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'I sec him, as he stands, 

With gifts of mercy in his outstretched hands; 
A kindly light within his gentle eyes, 
Sad as the toil in which his heart grew wise ; 
His lips half parted with the constant smile 
That kindled truth hut foiled the deepest guile; 
His head bent forward, and his willing ear 
Divinely patient right and wrong to hear : 
Great in his goodness, humble in his state, 
Firm in his purpose, yet not passionate. 
He led his people with a tender hand. 
And won by love a sway beyond command." 

George H. Boker. 



Inspiration Series of Patriotic Americans 

THE WONDERFUL 
STORY OF LINCOLN 



AND THE MEANING OF HIS LIFE 
FOR THE YOUTH AND PAT- 
RIOTISM OF AMERICA 



By C. M. STEVENS 
Author of "The Wonderful Story of IVashington" 



NEW YORK 
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY 



£1457 



Copyright, 1917, by 
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY 



...r 



OCT 29 1917 



A477263 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Introductory Considerations 1 

A Personal Life and Its Interest to Americans. 

The Process of Life from Within. 

A Life Built as One Would Have the Nation. 

II. The Problem of a Worth-While Life .... 9 

The Lincoln Boy of the Kentucky Woods. 
Home-Seekers in the Wild West. 
A Wonderful Family in the Desolate Wilderness. 
Way-Marks of Right Life. 

III. The Lincoln Boy 27 

How the Lincoln Boy Made the Lincoln Man. 
Some Signs Along the Early Way. 
Illustrations Showing the Making of a Man. 
Lincoln's First Dollar. 
The Characteristics of a Superior Mind. 

IV. The Wilderness as the Garden of Political 

Liberty 45 

Small Beginnings in Public Esteem. 
Tests of Character on the Lawless Frontier. 
The Pioneer Missionary of Humanity. 
Experiences in the Indian War. 
Life-Making Decisions. 

v. Business Not Harmonious with the Struggle 

FOR Learning 68 

Making a Living and Learning the Meaning of Life. 
Out of the Wilderness Paths into the Great Highway. 
Lincoln's First Law Case. 
The Man Who Could Not Live for Self Alone. 

VI. Helpfulness and Kindness of a Worth- While 

Character 83 

The Love of Freedom and Truth. 
Wit-Makers and Their Wit. 
Turbulent Times and Social Storms. 
The Frontier "Fire-Eater." 
Honor to Whom Honor Is Due. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

VII. Simplicity and Sympathy Essential to Genu- 
ine Character 101 

Nearing the Heights of a Public Career. 

Some Characteristics of Momentous Times. 

The Beginnings of Great Tragedy. 

The Life Struggle of_ a Man Translated Into the Life 

Struggle of a Nation. 
Some Human Interests Making Lighter the Burdens of 

the Troubled Way. 

VIII. The Man and the Confidence of the People . 121 

Typical Incidents From Among Momentous Scenes. 
Experiences Demanding Mercy and Not Sacrifice. 
Humanity and the Great School of Experience. 
Simple Interests That Never Grow Old. 
Some Incidents From the Great Years. 

IX. Falsehood Aids No One's Truth 140 

Freedom to Misrepresent Is Not Freedom. 
Homely Ways To Express Truth. 

X. The Friend of Humanity 156 

The Great Tragedy. _ ^ „ r. 

The Time When "Those Who Came To Scofl Remamed 

To Pray." . 

Some Typical Examples Giving Views of Lincoln s Life. 
Remembrance At the End of a Hundred Years. 

XI. Concluding Reflections 168 

A Masterpiece of Meaning for America. 
The Harmonizing Contrast of Men. 
The Mission of America. 



LINCOLN 

AND AMERICAN FREEDOM 



CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS 

I. A PERSONAL LIFE AND ITS INTEREST TO AMERICANS 

** America First '^ has probably as many varieties 
of meaning and use as * ' Safety First. ' ' It means to 
every individual very much according to what feel- 
ings it inspires in him of selfishness or patriotism. 
We are inspired as we believe, and, to be an Ameri- 
can, it is necessary to appreciate the meaning and 
mission of America. 

American history is composed of the struggle to 
get clear the meaning of American liberty. Through 
many years of distress and sacrifice, known as the 
Revolutionary War, the American people freed 
themselves from un-American methods and mas- 

1 



THE STORY OF LINCOLN 



teries imposed on them from across the sea. Out 
of that turmoil of minds came forth one typical 
leader and American, George Washington. But we 
did not yet have clear the meaning of America, and 
through yet more years of even worse suffering, in- 
volving the Civil "War, we freed ourselves from the 
war-making methods and masteries entrenched 
within our own government. Out of that political 
turmoil of minds appeared another American, Abra- 
ham Lincoln, whose life represents supremely the 
most important possibilities in the meaning and ideal 
of America. To know the mind-making process that 
developed Washington and Lincoln is to know not 
only the meaning but also the mission of America. 

Every American child and every newcomer to our 
shores is in great need to understand clearly and 
indisputably their interest in American freedom, as 
being human freedom and world freedom, if they are 
to realize and fulfill their part as Americans. 

The American vision of moral freedom and social 
righteousness can in no way be made clearer than 
in studying the process of development that individ- 
ually prepared Washington and Lincoln to be the 
makers and preservers of a developing democracy for 
America and for the American mind of the world. 

Lincoln's early life has interest and meaning only 
for those who are seeking to understand the pioneer 



INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS 3 

political principles, fundamental in character and 
civilization, out of which could develop a mind and 
manhood equipped for the greatest and noblest of 
human tasks. To take his *' backwoods" experiences 
and their comparatively uncouth incidents, as in- 
teresting merely because they happened to a man 
who became famous, is to miss every inspiration, 
value and meaning so important in building his way 
as man and statesman. To read the early incidents 
of Lincoln's life for the isolated interest of their 
being the queer, peculiar or pathetic biography of a 
notable character has little that is either inspiring 
or informing to a boy in the light of present experi- 
ences and methods of living. Indeed, many social 
episodes of pioneer customs are seemingly so trivial 
or coarse, in comparison, as to detract in respect 
from a boy's ideal of the historical Lincoln. 

The pioneer frontier was the social infancy of a 
new meaning for civilization. Its lowly needs of 
humble equality were the first social interests of Lin- 
coln, and the wonderful story of his life in that place 
and time, if told as merely historical happenings, in- 
cidentally noticeable only because they happened to 
Lincoln, becomes more and more frivolous and dis- 
esteeming in interest to boyhood, and to the general 
reader, as current social customs develop away be- 
yond those times. This is why such strained efforts 



THE STORY OF LINCOLN 



have been made to give the incidents of his social in- 
fancy a pathetic interest, or some other sympathetic 
appeal, where everything was so unromantic, indus- 
trious, simple, enjoyable and faithful to the earth. 
Those lowly years were sacred privacy to him. He 
knew there was nothing in them for a biographer, 
and he said so. His experience is valuable only in 
showing how it developed a man. True enough, the 
biographically uninteresting trivialities of his early 
years were not from him but from his environment. 
This is proven from the fact that two wider contrast- 
ing environments are hardly possible than those of 
Washington and Lincoln, and yet out of them came 
the same model character and supreme American. 



II. THE PROCESS OF LIFE FROM WITHIN 

Standard authorities have already fully recorded 
Lincoln ^s biography and its historical environment. 
There yet remains the far more difficult, delicate and 
consequential message from generation to genera- 
tion, so much needed in patriotic appreciation, to 
interpret his rise from those vanished social origins, 
in order that there may be a just valuation of his life 
by American youth. 



INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS 5 

The schoolboy learns with little addition to his 
ideals, or to his patriotism, or humanity, when he 
reads of a person, born in what appears to be the 
most sordid and pathetic destitution of the wild 
West, at last becoming a martyr president. The 
scenes in the making of Lincoln's life run by too fast 
in the reading for the strengthening life-interest to 
be received and appreciated. The human process of 
Lincoln's youth, with its supreme lesson of patience 
and labor and growth, is lost in considering the man 
solely as a strange figure of American history. If 
that life can be separated enough from the political 
turmoil so as to be seen and to be given a worthy in- 
terpretation, there is thus a service that may be worth 
while for the American youth. 

Heroes have been made in many a historical crisis 
and they represent some splendid devotion to a single 
idea of human worth, but Lincoln's heroism was the 
far severer test of a hard struggle through many 
years. He came near encountering every discour- 
agement and in mastering every difficulty that may 
befall any American from the worst to the best, and 
from the lowliest to the most responsible position. 

The poet has expressed these valuations arising 
through the frailties and vicissitudes of his long, 
tragic struggle in the following lines: 



THE STORY OF LINCOLN 



*'A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears; 
A quaint knight- errant of the pioneers; 
A homely hero born of star and sod ; 
A Peasant Prince; a Masterpiece of God.'' 

Lincoln's life has much more for American youth 
than the adventure-story of a backwoods boy of pion- 
eer days on his unknown way to be a hero of Ameri- 
can history. What Lincoln thought he was and what 
he made out of his relations with those around him 
are only incidental to the inspiring patience with 
which he kept the faith of high meaning within him, 
and the labor with which he strove on until his ideal 
came clear as one of the supreme visions of hu- 
manity. 

Every really ambitious American boy asks himself 
the question. How did he do it ? The probably cor- 
rect answer is that he didn't do it. He made himself 
the right man and the right people did it. 

We do not now hear so much of Lincoln as the 
*' fireplace" student, because that word no longer car- 
ries so pathetic a vision as it did to the American 
boy. ''Lincoln the railsplitter" has almost disap- 
peared from the phrases of patriotic eulogy for this 
great American, because the task and significance of 
railsplitting no longer bear the force of meaning that 
they did to the boys of Civil- War days. This means 



INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS 7 

that, if the American boy is to receive any inspira- 
tion from the early life of Lincoln, there must be 
achieved some new and more significant form of in- 
terpretation from the making of his life and char- 
acter. 

Even the strong description of Edwin Markham 
becomes more figurative than concrete in its illus- 
tration more poetic than material, when he says, 

''He built the rail-pile as he built the state, 
Pouring his splendid strength through every blow, 
The conscience of him testing every stroke. 
To make his deed the measure of a man." 



III. A LIFE BUILT AS ONE WOULD HAVE THE NATION 

Lincoln's life may be prized as much in what he 
did for himself as in w^hat he did for his country, 
because in the course of our interest they mean the 
same and become the same. He has shown to every 
American boy that the right desire, no matter what 
the circumstances and conditions, will invariably 
lead along the right way to the successful life, be- 
cause the successful character is a successful career 
for a successful humanity. Very clearly one thing 
is sure, he was wonderfully successful in finding the 



8 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

right thing to do and in finding the right way to 
do it. That is what humanity wants and such a man 
is the human ideal. Accordingly, Lincoln's personal 
moral development, apart from his historical public 
career, is an introductory story inspiring an interest 
for the patriotic study of his statesmanship and the 
fundamental principles of American life. 

Any boy or girl can appreciate the events that en- 
tered into the making of Lincoln's mind and charac- 
ter,^ but only a student of statesmanship and history 
can read beyond this and appreciate the almost su- 
perhuman task which Lincoln carried through to the 
extinction of slavery and the preservation of the 
United States of America. 

In that view we are not here writing the biography 
or history of Lincoln the Statesman, nor of Lincoln 
the War President, for that work has already been 
exhaustively and nobly done, but to give the inspir- 
ing meaning of his experiences from which arose 
the boy and man representing above all others the 
meaning and mission of Americans and America. 



CHAPTER II 

I. THE PROBLEM OF A WORTHWHILE LIFE 

Many of the early events entering into Lincoln ^s 
life seem too trivial to mention in the light of his 
great services to America. But the human struggle 
and the moral achievement of a supreme American 
ideal cannot be appreciated or understood unless the 
experiences buffeting the way to it, and their cir- 
cumstances, are known for what they mean to his 
life. Trivial experiences have very much to do with 
forming our lives and without them we can neither 
appreciate nor understand the great events that we 
believe have given us our career and our destiny. 

After being nominated for the presidency of the 
United States, Lincoln was asked for material from 
his early life out of which to make a biography. 

''Wliy," he replied earnestly, as if this was a sa- 
cred privacy in his own profound struggle, ''it is a 
great folly to attempt to make anything out of me 
or my early life. It can all be condensed in a single 
sentence; and that sentence you will find in Grey's 

9 



10 TEE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Elegy : 'The short and simple annals of the poor.' " 

His early friends all agree that he was lazy and 
idle, but, when we ask closer, they tell us that he spent 
his time '* reading and writing and arguing." One 
of his most admiring friends hired him for a certain 
period and became greatly disgusted at the young 
man's preference for idling his time away reading. 
Another friend one day found him reading, and, 
with the intention of severely rebuking him, asked 
what he was doing. *' Reading law," was the reply, 
without taking his eye from the page. 

'* Almighty Gosh!" was all the disgusted friend 
could say. Reading was bad enough waste of time, 
but to be reading law was beyond all use of words 
or censure. 

So, it merely proves that no one can be understood 
by the historical student, except as the conditions of 
mental soil in which the character grew are under- 
stood. And especially is it good to learn why the 
prophet is without honor in his own country, some- 
times not even known in his o^w\ age. Home people 
rarely or never understand the unusual worker, be- 
cause they cannot measure outside of their own ex- 
perience, and their opinions rarely give much in- 
sight into the great laborer born among them, with 
the great urge, if not the vision, of work and the way. 

Lincoln is probably the last Great American who 



PROBLEM OF A WORTHWHILE LIFE 11 



shall ever have to begin his mind-making as any- 
thing less than an ^'lieir of all ages." In Lincoln's 
case it seemed as if all else was banished that a mind 
might build itself up anew to be a fundamental in- 
terpretation of American civilization. Like the great 
Newi:on, he built his world of principle out of the 
particulars of original experience, and found that it 
was the order of the universe. And yet, it might be 
said that he was a failure in particulars and minor 
matters, for he thought in terms of general humanity 
and s\\T.ing the world into a new consciousness and 
vision of the moral law. 

As Mr. Herndon says, ''His origin was in that un- 
kno^vn and sunless bog in which history never made 
a footprint." The social origin and development of 
Christ were far less obscure, humble and lowly in 
destitute and helpless environment, before the spe- 
cial task of preserving a meaning in the earth as a 
home for man. 

Julia Ward Howe expresses the seriousness at- 
tending the possibilities of every new-born soul, as 
she says, of Lincoln, 

''Through the dim pageant of the years 
A wondrous tracery appears : 
A cabin of the western wild 
Shelters in sleep a new-born child, 



12 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Nor nurse, nor parent dear, can know 
The way those infant feet must go ; 
And yet a nation's help and hope 
Are sealed within that horoscope." 

It was certainly impossible for a pioneer of the 
early frontier to imagine how the rich live now, but 
it is not so hard for any one now to imagine how 
people lived then, if he will go into the deep woods 
with only a few simple tools and try to live. It can 
be done and it will probably be a healthful experi- 
ence, but not an experience that any person would 
be expected to try twice. 

It is therefore not needful to the setting of our 
story about the making of a man, for any extended 
description to be made of the ignorance and the pov- 
erty common to those times. 

It is enough for us to say with Maurice Thompson 
in his lines : 

"He was the North, the South, the East, the West; 
The thrall, the master, all of us in one." 

Ida Tarbell, after her extensive original researches 
into the early life of Lincoln, very thoughtfully, says, 

"He seems to have had as nearly a universal hu- 
man sympathy as any one in history. A man could 



TEE LINCOLN BOY 13 

not be so high or so low that Lincoln could not meet 
him and he could not be so much of a fool, or so many- 
kinds of a fool. He could listen unruffled to cant, 
to violence, to criticism, just and unjust. Amazingly 
he absorbed from each man the real thing he had to 
offer, annexed him b}^ sho\^ing him that he mider- 
stood, and yet gave him somehow a sense of the im- 
possibility of considering him alone, and leaving out 
the multitudes of other men as convinced and as loyal 
as he was." 



n. THE LINCOLN BOY OF THE KENTUCKY WOODS 

We may well believe that the little Lincoln boy 
was thrilled with stories of noxious "varmints" and 
wild '^Lijuns." As the fire crackled in the wide 
earthen fireplace and the sparks flew up the broad 
dirt chimney, we may well suppose the mystic super- 
stitions of the ignorant times thrilled the young mind 
with vague fears and often with indescribable dread. 

Doubtless he often heard his father tell the story 
of his own desperate boyhood, how Mordecai, the 
elder brother, had, just in the nick of time, saved his 
life from the tomahawk. 



14 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Abe's father when a child went out to their clear- 
ing with his two brothers and their father, whose 
name was Abraham. We may be sure that their 
watchful eyes looked closely into every pile of brush 
or clump of bushes that might hide an Indian. But 
the Indians were trained to hide like snakes or foxes. 
So that which was ever expected and feared hap- 
pened. There was a shot from an unseen form in the 
bushes, and the father of the family fell dead. 

Mordecai, the eldest, ran for the cabin, the other 
boy ran for help, but the younger boy, too bewildered 
and not comprehending what had happened, re- 
mained by the side of his fallen father. 

As Mordecai looked out through the chinks of the 
cabin to see the enemy, which he supposed to be in 
numbers, he saw a lone Indian come out and seize the 
boy. With quick aim he fired and the Indian fell 
dead. The little boy, now understanding, began to 
scream, when Mordecai ran to him and carried him 
into the cabin. 

It was in the death of this pioneer that the Lin- 
colns became subjected to such poverty. And yet it 
is doubtful if their poverty was much worse than 
most of those around them. In this vision of fron- 
tier life we can get some idea at what great cost has 
been achieved the civilization that composes the 
foundations of this country. 



HOME-SEEKEBS IN THE WILD WEST 15 

Lives seem insignificant and their experiences 
trivial, but in them are the making of all that is good 
and great. In the making of typical lives is to be 
seen the meaning and the making of the nation. It 
is said that Lincoln's first attempts to write his name 
were made with a stick upon the ground. Those let- 
ters have long since vanished and yet that name is 
written in sentiments and deeds of gold throughout 
the earth. 

Wilbur Nesbit holds up the jewel of Lincoln's life 
in the following lines: 

"Not as the great who grew more great, 
Until they have a mystic fame — 
No stroke of pastime or of fate 
Gave Lincoln his undying name. 
A common man, earth-bred, earth-born, 
One of the breed who work and wait, — 
His was a soul above all scorn. 
His was a heart above all hate." 



in. HOME-SEEKERS IN THE WILD WEST 

Thomas Lincoln became a home-seeking wanderer 
soon after the death of his father. According to the 



16 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

laws of that time, all the property went to the eldest, 
and it may be supposed that little attention was paid 
in that rough destitute life to the raising of Thomas. 
He grew up simply ^'a wandering, laboring boy," 
whose hard circumstances left little ambition or hope 
in him. But, in the course of all wondrous events 
and time, he became a carpenter, well respected, and 
married his cousin, the niece of the man in whose 
shop he worked. This niece was Nancy Hanks, 
daughter of Joseph Hanks, who had married Nan- 
nie Shipley, a Quaker girl. From all authentic ac- 
counts that can be gathered concerning Nancy 
Hanks, she was one of God's great women. 

This much at least is sufficiently verified that she 
was a strong, handsome girl, noted for her religious 
zeal, and was one of the most sought-for singers at 
the marvellous camp-meetings of those days. That 
the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks 
was regarded as an important community event is 
the testimony of several who were present, for every 
social enjoyment known to the times was there, and 
the occasion was celebrated with unusual demonstra- 
tions of good will. 

The wedding took place June 12, 1806, and the 
documents of the marriage show that she had enough 
property left her by her father to require a guardian 
appointed by the court. The uncle with whom she 



H03IE-SEEKERS IN THE WILD WEST 17 

lived was her guardian, appointed on the death of 
her parents when she was nine years old. 

Documents in existence also show that Thomas 
Lincoln owTied a large tract of land, that he held 
responsible public position, and was w^ll respected 
in his community. The stories of shiftlessness and 
shame so long told as truth must be cast out as among 
the curiosities of envious gossip, sometimes ac- 
cepted even by those it injures as true history. 

A year after the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and 
Nancy Hanks their first child was born, a girl, which 
they named Nancy. Twelve years later, after the 
death of her mother and the marriage of her father 
to Sarah Bush Johnson, this daughter renamed her- 
self Sarah, by which name she was known until her 
death at the age of twenty. 

Sarah was born at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but 
soon after the family moved to a farm, bought sev- 
eral years before by Thomas Lincoln, about four- 
teen miles away. There on February 12, 1809, was 
born one of the greatest of all Americans, Abraham 
Lincoln. 

The Lincoln home was so rude that descriptions of 
it, in comparison with present poverty-stricken 
homes, sounds like distressful destitution, but it was 
the home of frontiersmen in pioneer days. All tes- 
timony agrees that no one suffered and that the boy 



18 THE STOEY OF LINCOLN 

grew strong and manly, in the abiding favor of 
friends, and in the noble aspirations of a superior 
destiny. 

When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old and 
his sister Sarah was near nine, his father desired to 
seek a better home, which the pioneer always 
dreamed of as farther on. He built a flatboat in a 
creek half a mile from his house, put his household 
goods upon it, and floated down the Rolling Fork on 
a voyage of discovery to Salt River, and down Salt 
River to the Ohio. At Thompson's Ferry on the In- 
diana shore he landed, stored his goods, and went 
back after his family, which he brought through on 
horseback. 



rV. A WONDERFUL FAMILY IN THE DESOLATE 
WILDERNESS 

Lincoln tells us of one thing his mother said to 
him which he never forgot, though he was not yet 
nine years old. Her thought for him became his 
dream of her. 

*' Mother wants her little boy to be honest, truth- 
ful, and kind to everybody, and always to trust in 
God." 



A WONDERFUL FAMILY 19 

The words of his ''angel mother," as he named her, 
were always the guiding star of his life. He always 
wanted to be what his mother said was her desire 
for him to be. He often said, ''All I am or hope 
to be I owe to my angel mother," and yet, as a poet 
has said it, that mother 

"Gave us Lincoln and never knew." 

An epidemic carried away Lincoln's mother in 
1818 when he was nine years of age. It was the be- 
ginning of that great man's acquaintance with grief, 
but the impression she had made on him never for- 
sook him. Her last words to the surrounding friends 
were, "I pray you to love your kindred and worship 
God." 

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked Charles 
Kingsley for the secret of his splendid life, he an- 
swered, "I once had a friend." So it was with Lin- 
coln. He once had a friend, and he always spoke 
of her as his "angel mother." 

So deeply had she impressed the nine-year-old boy 
with her religious faith that he could never be satis- 
fied until he induced a preacher to preach a sermon 
and offer a prayer over her grave. 

In that profoundly earnest incident of sympathy 
is to be seen the love that leavened his life to the 



20 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

making of a man nobler than kings among men. 

Of these early years Lincoln spoke but little, and 
the gossip of old people, who might have told in- 
teresting incidents, has not proven altogether reli- 
able. One of these personal incidents told by Lin- 
coln of his childliood may be regarded as typical of 
his life. It was from a dim memory of what he had 
been taught concerning soldiers and war. 

Lincoln said that fie had a memory of only one in- 
cident relating to the "War of 1812. This happened 
near the close of the war. He had been fishing and 
had caught a little fish. On the way home he met a 
soldier returning from the war. He had been told 
that he must be kind to soldiers. Thinking of this, 
he went up to the soldier and gave him the fish. 

Even the wilderness has a succession of new scenes 
and offers an endless variety of revelations for the 
growing mind. Only the will of disordered interests 
is able to get bad things into the desires of a child. 
The Lincoln boy was fortunate in living with good 
people. There was no one to impress him with false 
ideas of life. 

We may be sure that there was something superior 
in Thomas Lincoln that he sought out only noble 
women, and that noble women were willing to trust 
their happiness and welfare to him. 

Thomas Lincoln could not hope to make a living 



A WONDERFUL FAMILY 21 

after his wife died and care properly for his house- 
hold needs, including the two motherless children. 
His own homeless childhood made him tender toward 
his little unmothered family, and, presently, he re- 
turned to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush John- 
son, another of God's own mother- women. 

She came with abundance of household goods and 
there was soon a comfortable Lincoln home. She 
loved the little boy she found on her arrival in the 
Indiana household, and encouraged him in his eager 
desire to know things. 

The ten-year-old Lincoln was eager to learn of the 
wondrous world beyond the woods and he asked 
many questions of wayfarers passing that way. One 
day a very trivial event happened, but in the won- 
drous revelation of things to the blooming mind it 
may have been one of the greatest in Lincoln's life. 

An emigrant wagon broke dovm near their place. 
The wife and two little daughters staid in Lincoln's 
home two or three days, till the wagon was repaired. 

*'The woman had books," so Lincoln tells us about 
it, ''and she read us stories." It was the first books 
he had ever seen and the first book-stories he had 
ever heard. In fact, it was also the first educated 
people he had ever seen. One of the little girls seems 
to have impressed him deeply, to have awakened in 
him a spiritual reverence for beautiful girlhood, and 



22 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

to have given him a never-dying vision of possible 
sympathy and character for a nobler social life. 



V. WAY-MARKS OF RIGHT LIFE 

Lincoln's new mother had three children of her 
own, but under her management they all lived to- 
gether, in the one-room house, in perfect harmony 
and friendship. 

Of the little Lincoln boy she said, ''His mind and 
mine, what little I had, seemed to run together. ' ' She 
said that there had never been a cross word or look 
between them and that she loved the little fellow as 
her own child. One thing is sure, to the American 
people, Sarah Bush Lincoln has forever given a sa- 
cred meaning to the name stepmother and hallowed 
its duties near to the meaning of mother. 

In her old age she was visited by a biographer of 
Lincoln, to whom she said, ''I had a son John, who 
was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I 
must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best 
boy I ever saw, or expect to see.'' 

Lincoln's sister Sarah, or Nancy, as she was also 
called, was a noble girl and was of inestimable help 
to Mrs. Lincoln in the labors of a pioneer home. She 
was quick to learn and she did her share in helping 



WAY-MARKS OF RIGHT LIFE 23 

her brother in his desire to learn. There was nothing 
remarkable about that brother, he was not wondrous, 
except in one thing, and that was his unceasing zeal 
to have a greater mind, and for that mind to be a 
right mind. 

His first real school life was to travel a deer path 
through the deep woods, nine miles each day, to 
school. 

He had no time to waste on useless knowledge. 
Josh Billings once exclaimed, lamenting, ''What's 
the use of larnin' so much that ain't so." Lincoln 
thought there was no use in such foolishness, and he 
sought to fill his mind only with useful information, 
valuable toward a greater life. 

For instance, he got hold of a small dictionary and 
he read it through and through with the eagerness 
that many people give to baseball news or a novel. 
Wlien the book called the ''Statutes of Indiana" fell 
into his hands he could hardly eat or sleep till he had 
read it through. When he finally got hold of a gram- 
mar, it was no dry reading to him and no task. He 
literally devoured its information and committed its 
principles to memory, as a value of the finest wealth. 
He was indeed remarkable or wondrous in nothing 
but the divine inspiration to enlarge a useful mind. 
These are the minds that make life worth living and 
invariably characterize the builders of the world. 



24 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

It appears that the first approach of Lincoln to 
the formation of a life-ideal, his first patriotic vision 
of American citizenship, was derived from reading a 
life of Washington. A friendly neighbor loaned him 
the book. His book-shelf was a chink in the log 
house. One night it rained into his book-shelf and 
the next morning he found his borrowed book bucked 
up into a most unreadable shape. Lincoln's intro- 
duction to Washington was unhappy and significant. 
Trivial as the incident might seem, it supplies sug- 
gestions of character on the way of superior worth 
to civilization. Events, one by one, build up or tear 
down together the structure of self or of the public 
system. 

The Lincoln boy could have shielded himself, as to 
the damaged book, behind personal irresponsibility 
for an accident, or he could have flatly refused to 
make good. If so, we may well guess that he would 
never have been President of the United States, and 
would never have served America in its dire peril so 
as to be honored by the whole world. He was not 
that kind of a character. As we trace the steps of 
moral integrity, the trivial incident becomes power- 
fully significant. The Lincoln boy made good. He 
worked three days for the owner of the damaged 
book, so that another should not suffer loss through 
any kindness or good- will to him ; also, beyond that. 



JVAY-MARKS OF FIGHT LIFE 25 

he could have no rest nor peace while any wrong 
existed between him and another man. 

From that time on he had before him the vision 
of a great American. Washington became his ideal 
type of character, and that ideal no doubt helped 
much to make him the patient power he was in the 
great crisis of his nation's existence. 

The rough and hard never hurt any one if they are 
healthy interests ; the rude and micultured wrong no 
taste if they are moral : and poverty injures nobody 
when it is clean and persevering and safe. So the 
hard requirements, rude living and destitute means 
only strengthened the boy more and more for the 
heroic responsibilities requiring such a type of man- 
hood. 

It is said that he memorized and often repeated 
for self-encouragement the homely old verses of the 
song, ^'Try, Try Again.'' 

''When you strive, it's no disgrace 
Though you fail to win the race; 
Bravely, then, in such a case. 
Try, try again. 

That which other folks can do. 
Why, with patience, may not you? 
All that's been done, you may do, 
If vou will but try." 



26 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

In a copy book the following lines, still preserved, 
were written by Lincoln : 

** Abraham Lincoln 
his hand and pen. 
he will be good but 
God knows when." 

This pathetic glimpse of the childliood dream may 
account for his profound interest in boys and boy- 
hood. When he had reached world-wide fame he 
said, *'The boy is the inventor and owner of the pres- 
ent, and he is our supreme hope for the future. Men 
and things everywhere minister unto him, and let no 
one slight his needs." 



CHAPTER III 

I. THE LINCOI N BOY AND HIS SISTER 

The wilderness never brought forth a more won- 
derful being than the child that became one of the 
greatest names in the history of America. Deep in 
the wild woods of Kentucky, in the humblest condi- 
tions of nature, farthest from the inventions of so- 
ciety, there arose a mind that gave great riches of 
thought to the making of civilization. 

Lincoln and his sister ''hired out," and the posi- 
tion of servant can hardly be servile or menial with 
such an illustrious American example, unless the 
master make it so. One woman, whose family had 
hired them both, testified to their lovable characters. 
Lincoln slept in the hay-loft during the period of his 
work, and he was noted for being remarkably con- 
siderate in ''keeping his place," and for not coming 
in "where he was not wanted." It is said that he 
would lift his hat and bow when he entered the house, 
27 



28 THE STOUY OF LINCOLN 

and that he was reliable, tender and kind, '4ike his 
sister." We wonder if his employers had only known 
of ''the angel" they were ''entertaining unawares," 
what would have been "his place" and where he 
would have been "wanted." Every such soul may, 
somewhere along the immortal way, be "an angel" 
"unaware" some time in the meaning of the great 
moral universe. 

As showing the making of Lincoln's mind, one of 
his first attempts at essay writing was on the sub- 
ject of "Cruelty to Animals" and another on "Tem- 
perance." 

During his earliest acquaintance with the first law- 
yer he had known, he wrote a paper on "American 
Government," and he anxiously asked the lawyer to 
read it and pass an opinion on its merits. The law- 
yer did so, declaring that the "world couldn't beat 
it," and expressing the opinion that some day the 
people would "hear from that boy." 

His repugnance toward acts of cruelty is shown by 
the first fist fight he ever had. 

Some boys had caught a mud-turtle and were hav- 
ing great sport in putting a coal of fire on its back 
to see it open up its shell and run. Lincoln was 
then not as large as some of the tormentors of the 
poor animal, but, coming by and seeing what they 
were doing, he dashed in among them, knocked the 



THE LINCOLN BOY AND THE 31 AN 29 

firebrand from the boy's hand, and fought them all 
away from the turtle. Then he gave them a fierce 
scolding for their cruelty. With tears in his eyes he 
declared that the terrapin's life was as sweet to it as 
theirs was to them. His appeal was successful and 
there was freedom henceforth in that community for 
the American turtle. 



II. HOW THE LINCOLN BOY MADE THE LINCOLN MAN 

The American boy, seeing anything of great in- 
terest acomplished, wants to know how it was done. 
That is true all the way from winning some game 
at play to making a million in some great enter- 
prise. But far more, in fact immeasurably more, is 
the making of a masterful mind, the development of 
a nation-making character, and of a world-historical 
man. Such was Abraham Lincoln, who was built up 
from what seems to be nothing on to the very high- 
est worth of mankind. How did he do if? ''HI 
only knew how," said a philosopher-mathematician, 
''I could turn the world over with a lever." ''If 
I only knew how," said a philosopher-farmer, "I 
could make a three-year-old calf between now and 
next Christmas." In other words, the belief has 



30 THE STOBY OF LINCOLN 

always prevailed that by thought made into will any- 
thing can be accomplished, provided thinking perse- 
veres in the right way for the right tiling. Success- 
ful ''might" always promotes the belief that it is 
right because it is successful, but the "successful" is 
no more than a temporary expedient toward coming 
failure, if it is not the righteousness of an immortal 
social system. 

So let us see how Lincoln did it. It is not much 
of a mystery how he became a masterful man. There 
must be a beginning place, and, for such a person, 
it must be a divine beginning place. He had a lov- 
ing mother and a home. It was the basis of his be- 
lief in humanity. The heart of the world he be- 
lieved to be like the two noble-souled women who 
mothered his young heart and growing mind. He 
says himself that he didn't do it but that they did it. 
So, the first thing for a boy who wants to be a mas- 
terful man is to take the advice of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes to have the right kind of ancestors. At least, 
it seems quite necessary for him to choose a loving 
mother and it will be a lightened task for him to do 
the rest. 

In 1823, while going to the Crawford school, there 
occurred an incident representing his invariable 
sense of honor. A buck's head was nailed to the wall 
and one day, probably experimenting as all boys do, 



THE LINCOLN BOY AND TEE MAN 31 

he pulled too hard on one of the horns and broke it 
off. No one saw hhn and when the teacher inquired 
for the mischief maker Lincoln promptly told how it 
happened. The teacher believed him and said no 
more about it. 

The first reprehensible thing known of the Lincoln 
boy was done soon after the death of his sister. She 
married at nineteen and died the next year. Lin- 
coln believed, as most others believed, that she died 
of ill-treatment. There w^as no way to express his 
fierce resentment but in writing, and he wrote some 
scurrilous letters to the ones against whom he was 
so angry. Some biographers, in the supposed cause 
of history, have published some alleged copies of 
those letters, but at worst they merely show what a 
boy could do in the distress occasioned by what he 
believed to be the murder of his sister, whom we may 
believe was the one great love of his life after the 
death of his mother. 

Being a good penman, Lincoln was often called 
on to wi^ite a line in copybooks. Among the proud 
possessors of a copybook so favored was Joe Rich- 
ardson. In his book Lincoln wrote these common- 
place, yet significant lines : 

*'Good boys who to their books apply 
Will all be great men by and by." 



32 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Lincoln was brought up in the midst of supersti- 
tions that prevailed in every act of life, but they 
seem to have made no impression on him. Many 
of the most estimable people believed the sun went 
round the earth, from the indisputable fact that in 
the morning it was on one side of the house and in 
the afternoon was on the other side. Many also be- 
lieved the earth to be flat, because any one trying 
to go so far as to go around it would naturally be- 
come lost, travel in a circle, as all lost people do, and 
come back to the same place, thinking they had gone 
around the world. 

People who argued otherwise were merely ''stuck 
up'' and "just proud to show themselves off." 
Doubtless, his belief about the sun and earth lost him 
his first love affair. 

He was going to school to Andrew Crawford, who 
also taught good manners, when he began to ex- 
change special attention with Miss Roby, a fine lass 
of fifteen. He especially had her gratitude for some 
help he gave her in a spelling class. When she was 
about to spell "defied" with a "y," he pointed to his 
eye, just in time to save her from disgrace with the 
teacher, and from losing her place in the class. 

But one day as they were walking along the road 
she made a remark that brought up an unfortunate 
subject. 



S03IE SIGNS 33 



*'Abe," said she, "look yonder, the sun is going 
down." 

"Reckon not," was the unfortunate reply. "It's 
us coming up. That's all." 

"Don't you suppose I've got eyes," she answered 
indignantly. 

"Reckon so," he replied, "but the sun's as still as 
a tree. When we 're swung up so 's the shine 's cut off, 
we call it night." 

"Abe," said she, "you're a consarned fool," and 
away she went, leaving him to the glory of his 
"stuck-up larnin'." 



m. SOME SIGNS ALONG THE EARLY WAY 

The Lincoln boy impressed all who knew him as 
being different from other boys, though they did not 
know just how. We now know that the difference 
consisted in his having a purpose to have a mind 
rather than to have a good time. And yet, Lincoln 
loved joyful sports and he was a favorite in all the 
social gatherings of the community. But his mind 
was not composed of sport experience, nor his in- 
terest in life inspired by sport success. The world- 
mind of books contained more value and richer prom- 



34 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

ise than the turmoil of happenings among compan- 
ions, or than those who were juggling interests in the 
hope of events. 

Lincoln's books were very limited in number but 
exceedingly wide in their humanity. Weems' ''Life 
of Washington" seems to have given him his ideal of 
American character and statesmanship, while the 
"Statutes of Indiana" aroused his interest in civil 
law and the American government. 

When addressing the senate of the state of New 
Jersey, in 1861, Lincoln said, "May I be pardoned 
if, on this occasion, I mention that away back in my 
childliood, the earliest days of my being able to read, 
I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the 
younger members have ever seen, 'Weems' Life of 
Washington.' I remember all the accounts there 
given of the battlefields and struggles for the liber- 
ties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon 
my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at 
Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the 
contest with the Hessians, the great hardships en- 
dured at that time, all fixed themselves in my mind 
more than any single revolutionary event; and you 
all know, for you have all been boys, how these early 
impressions last longer than others. I recollect 
thinking then, boy even though I was, that there 
must have been something more than common that 



SOME SIGNS 35 



these men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious 
that that thing shall be perpetuated in accordance 
with the original idea for which that struggle was 
made." 

Lincoln told one of his friends that he read through 
every book he had ever heard of in his surroundings 
for a distance of fifty miles. The industry with 
which he sought to learn and his unceasing endeavor 
to build up his mind were marks of the genius that 
possessed him, the spirit that made him one of the 
strongest men of a world-wide work. 

In the whole country round there was only one 
newspaper subscriber, and that was in Gentryville, 
Indiana, for a weekly paper from Louisville. Lin- 
coln walked to town every week to see that paper 
and discuss the news. By the time he had become 
a man, in Menard County, Illinois, his neighbors 
went to him in order to know things, and he was a 
good custodian of the knowledge he had gained. His 
opinions coincided with common sense. So, com- 
mon sense made him President of the United States, 
saved a United Nation, and gave Lincoln a never- 
dying place in the love and honor of mankind. 

Lincoln walked six miles to borrow a grammar, 
and he studied it till he mastered the principles of 
the English language. Many another boy has 
thought that he had few troubles more unbearable 



36 THE STOEY OF LINCOLN 

than the study of composition, but many another boy 
has not been prepared to speak the world-stirring 
speech, such as was spoken by Lincoln at the dedica- 
tion of the battlefield of Gettysburg. 



IV. ILLUSTRATIONS SHOWING THE MAKING OF A MAN 

Lincoln, very early in life, believed that witnesses 
must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but 
the truth. 

Matilda Johnson, his stepsister, was very fond of 
him, and she often ran away from the house to be 
with him where he was at work. Lincoln would 
rather tell her stories than work, so the mother for- 
bade the child from following him to work. But, 
one morning, she disobeyed and ran after him. She 
tried to surprise him by jumping up at his back, 
and catching him by the shoulders. In doing so the 
axe was swung around so that it severely cut her 
ankle. Matilda screamed with pain but Lincoln soon 
had the bleeding stopped and the wound bound. 
Then came the problem. 

"Tilda," he exclaimed, "I am astonished at you. 
How could you disobey your mother? Now, what 
are you going to tell her?" 



THE MAKING OF A MAN 37 

"I'll tell her I did it with the axe," she said in 
the midst of her crying. "That will be the truth, 
won't it f 

"Yes," replied the boy, "that's the truth as far as 
it goes, but it is not all of the truth. You tell the 
whole truth and trust your mother for the rest." 

Tilda went home limping and weeping with the 
whole truth, and the good mother thought she had 
been punished enough. 

The self-possessed way in which Lincoln conducted 
himself is well illustrated in his experience with the 
boaster who was telling of his horse-race, and espe- 
cially endeavoring to impress his story upon the 
youthful Lincoln. 

Uncle Jimmy Larkins, the boastful owner of the 
fast horse, was much of a hero in the eyes of a small 
boy who grew up to be Captain John Lamar, the 
man who tells the story. 

Lincoln paid no attention to the boasting. Uncle 
Jimmy did not like this and the Lamar boy thought 
it very rude in Lincoln. Finally Uncle Jimmy said, 
"Abe, I've got the best horse in the world: he won 
that race and never drew a long breath." 

But Abe still paid no attention. Uncle Jimmy 
didn't like it some more and the Lamar boy was 
disgusted that Lincoln did not give due respect for 
something so important. 



38 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

*'I say, Abe," repeated Uncle Jimmy emphati- 
cally, *'I have the best horse in the world; after all 
that running he never drew a long breath." 

Then Abe had to say something, so he said, ''Well, 
Uncle Jimmy, why don't you tell us how many short 
breaths he took." 

"Everybody laughed and Uncle Jimmy got all- 
fired hot," says Captain Lamar. "He spoke some- 
thing about fighting Abe, and Abe said, 'If you don't 
shut up, I'll throw you into the pond,' and Uncle 
Jimmy shut up. ' ' 

Captain Lamar, in concluding his comments, said, 
"I was very much hurt at the way my hero was 
treated, but I have lived to change my ideas about 
heroes." 



V. LINCOLN'S FIRST DOLLAR 

Lincoln enjoyed the commonplace interests of 
ordinary life, and much that we know of him is from 
conversations with friends over the early lessons of 
his youth. 

One day while he was president, as he was talking 
with Secretary Seward over weighty affairs of state, 



LINCOLN'S FIRST DOLLAR 39 

he suddenly broke from the subject they were dis- 
cussing and said, '' Seward, do you know how I 
earned my first dollar?" 

The well-to-do and rather aristocratic Secretary 
of State replied that he did not know. 

''It was this way," Lincoln continued. ''I was 
about eighteen years of age and had succeeded in 
raising enough produce to justify a trip down the 
Ohio to the markets at New Orleans. I made a flat- 
boat big enough to hold the barrels containing our 
things and was soon ready for loading up and start- 
ing on our journey. 

''There were few landing places for steamers, and, 
where passengers desired to get on to one of the pass- 
ing boats, they had to be taken out into the river in 
order to get aboard. 

"While I was looking my boat over to see if any- 
thing more could be done to strengthen it, two men 
came down to the shore in a carriage, with their 
trunks, for the purpose of boarding a passing 
steamer. They looked the boats over and came down 
to me. 

" 'Who owns this boat ?' they asked. 

*'I very proudly answered, 'I do.' 

" 'Will you take us and our trunks out to the 
steamer*?' 

"I was glad for a chance to earn something and I 



40 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

soon had them and their trunks loaded into my boat. 
I soon sculled them out to the steamer. They climbed 
aboard and I lifted their trunks on deck. I expected 
them to hand me a couple of bits for my work, but 
both seemed to have forgotten their dues to me. The 
steamer was about to start, when I called out to 
them, 'You have forgotten to pay me.' 

''Each took a silver half-dollar and threw it over 
into the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe 
my good fortune. That seems like a little thing but 
it was one of the most important incidents in my 
life. I could hardly believe that I had been able to 
earn, by my own work, a dollar in less than a day. 
I now knew that such things could be done. I was 
a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time. ' ' 

Lincoln received eight dollars a month for his trip 
down the Ohio and Mississippi from Indiana, but he 
probably got much priceless value out of it in the 
broader view of life it gave him. He had already 
prepared himself to think on what he saw, and, from 
all attainable evidence from every side, to reach rea- 
sonable and justified conclusions. 

This voyage was comparatively uneventful ex- 
cept that one night, after the little boat crew of three 
men had sold their goods, they were attacked by 
seven negroes, who came aboard intending to kill 
and rob them. But, after a lively fight, the assailants 



A SUPERIOR MIND 41 

were driven off and the boat was swung out into the 
river. 

One cannot help thinking about what a difference 
it would have made to the negro race if those negroes 
had killed the man whom destiny had then started 
on the way to make their people free. 



VI. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUPERIOR MIND 

The boy who reads the story of Lincoln, desiring 
to get real help in building his life, will find no mira- 
cle nor any short-cuts to get easily the ambitions of 
life. Lincoln did not know the office he wanted to 
hold, but he knew the kind of man he wanted to be 
and he worked unceasingly to reach that ideal of 
mind and manhood. In proportion, it is no harder 
now to know more than others, in order to be corre- 
spondingly useful to others, than it was in Lincoln's 
time. 

Lincoln said that he went to school by ''littles" al- 
together not more than a year, but no one ever thinks 
of him as anything less than a learned man. All 
records show that he was intellectually at home in 
company with any worldlj^-wise men. It was in the 
prudent selection of interests nobly directed in hon- 



42 THE STOEY OF LINCOLN 

orable ways that gave him world-wisdom from the 
most limited supply, while now the multiplication of 
great books has made the diffusion of knowledge al- 
most unlimited for anyone who seeks to be worth 
while. But it was in his high moral nature where 
was to be found the secret of his unwavering prog- 
ress. Numerous characteristic incidents illustrate 
how little he was disturbed by the ill-nature of 
others. 

That Lincoln was above '^ holding spite" or '* bear- 
ing a grudge" is shown in his experience with the 
noted Kentucky lawyer, John Breckenridge. 

There had been a murder at Boonville, Indiana, 
and Lincoln went to hear the speech made to the 
jury by the defense. He had never before heard a 
learned and eloquent man. The powerful plea of 
the silver-tongued John Breckenridge went through 
the sensitive soul of Lincoln like heavenly music. 
Forgetting his backwoodsman appearance, he rushed 
forward with others at the close of the speech to 
express his admiration. 

Breckenridge was a ''gentleman" of the South, 
not used to being familiarly addressed by anyone 
having the appearance of being ''poor white trash." 
He gazed in insulted amazement at the presumptu- 
ous youth and strode indignantly away. 

This was probably the first knowledge Lincoln 



A SUPERIOE MIND 43 

had of the artificial social barriers set up by men 
developing antagonizing classes. Here he first met 
the great problem of the ages in a land where all are 
born free and equal before life and law. It was a 
social partisanship not only contrary to common 
sense and moral law, but in violation of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, the Constitution of the United 
States, and the entire meaning of America. This is 
the great significance of Lincoln, that his life so un- 
mistakably refuted so many un-American ideas of 
society and civilization. 

In 1862 this same Breckenridge, now an humble 
petitioner for presidential favors, was introduced to 
President Lincoln, who then completed his expres- 
sion of admiration for the excellent speech made by 
Mr. Breckenridge in the Indiana murder case. The 
able lawyer was indeed dumbfounded and it gave 
him a new vision of Lincoln, if not of the relation- 
ship of men. That equality of mind and opportu- 
nity which Lincoln represented was the master mean- 
ing of America, disclosing that in its freedom there 
is opportunity for the poorest to become the greatest 
through human values the most lasting and worth- 
while. 

Lincoln could have satisfied a righteous resent- 
ment against such haughty treatment toward the 
poor as was shown by Breckenridge to him at Boon- 



44 THE STOBY OF LINCOLN 

ville, and he could have given a deserved rebuke to 
pride in a land where pride of that kind is unpa- 
triotic as well as immoral, but Lincoln chose the bet- 
ter part. It reminds us of the words of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, ''Lincoln's heart was as large as the world, 
but nowhere had any room for the memory of a 
wrong. '^ 



CHAPTER IV 

I. THE WILDERNESS AS THE GARDEN OF POLITICAL 
LIBERTY 

The pioneer and frontiersman of early America 
are very strange beings when viewed from our pres- 
ent social customs, or as studied from the so-called 
refinements of modern interests and conveniences, 
but, no doubt, the problem is now before us, which 
shall be the makers of America, the pioneer view of 
freedom and right, or influence from the present 
methods of material distinctions and individual suc- 
cess. We may be sure that whichever one of these 
ideas gets first to the heart of the American boy, that 
is the ideal that will make of him the resulting man. 
The American boy loves to go to the bottom of things 
and so the submarine idea of interests is full of fan- 
cies. He likes to get to the top of things and the 
airship carries him away on the wings of adventure. 
But this all is merely because he likes freedom and 
conquest. There is a limit to the submarine and the 
airship, as there is to all machinery ideals, but there 

45 



46 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

was no limit to the frontiersman and the pioneer. 
The boy wants no limit, and there is the same open- 
ing now to be a frontiersman and a pioneer in hu- 
man values as there ever was, provided they are hu- 
man values and not individual aggrandizement. The 
only consideration is that the scenes have changed 
and the obstacles known as 'things in the way" are 
different. 

The pioneer and the frontiersman were laboring 
to achieve something far more important than clear- 
ing away trees, killing wildcats or subduing the wild 
men of the wilderness. Such dangerous and exciting 
work was but an incident in the great struggle. They 
were striving for a safe, free and sufficient living for 
family and home. But far greater than the economic 
interest was the ideal interest of freedom from the 
will of overlords. That sublime goal of human en- 
deavor is probably no nearer the heart's desire now 
than it was then. Society is not yet out of the wil- 
derness of wildcat schemers and wild men monopo- 
lists. 

The American boy has an immeasurably greater 
opportunity to continue the heroic and patriotic 
work of the frontiersman and pioneer. The safety, 
freedom and sufficiency of America is merely well 
started on its second period. The first great epoch 
of American humanity became symbolized in the life 



SMALL BEGINNINGS 47 

of Washington and the second in the life of Lincoln. 
If there is a third great symbolic character, it is 
yet to come. The American boy must feel the mean- 
ing combined in Washington and Lincoln if he is 
to be a pioneer civilizing, socially and politically, the 
frontier of America for a nobler world. 



II. SMALL BEGINNINGS IN PUBLIC ESTEEM 

The wilderness family was humble as its needs. 
It was as least as good as its neighbors. One thing 
we should appreciate as significant, in the destitu- 
tion of the times, the Linr^oln family was adven- 
turous and enterprising until it arrived for final set- 
tlement in the richest soil-regions of the Mississippi 
valley, and the freest mind-regions of political 
America. 

In the spring of 1830, on account of ill health in 
the neighborhood, Lincoln's father decided to move 
from the unpromising forests of Indiana to the fer- 
tile prairies of Illinois. Friends and relatives had 
already preceded him, and had sent back glowing 
accounts of the prairie lands. When the family ar- 
rived in Illinois, Lincoln was probably as near des- 
titute as ever in his life, and he entered into a con- 



48 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

tract 'Ho split four hundred rails for every yard of 
brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would 
make a pair of trousers. ' ' 

Lincoln was now past twenty-one, and, it may be 
said, not until his arrival at New Salem had he found 
firm ground on which to begin building to some plan 
of life. Undoubtedly, his vision of the future was 
one of very vague dreams. That he was adventurous 
and looked beyond his community for the fulfillment 
of his fortunes is shown in his effort at commercial 
enterprise with nothing as his capital. He now ar- 
ranged to take a second raft of home goods to New 
Orleans. Such a venture required no small amount 
of courage and self-reliance. 

Wide observation with suitable thinking seems to 
give one prudence and steadiness of mind in emer- 
gencies. In several trying instances this proved to 
be true in Lincoln's experience, long before the civi- 
lization of America was depending upon his warm 
heart and clear head. Many such instances seem as 
trivial as the trimmings of a sapling, but they are 
the perfecting process that makes possible the great 
oak. 

When his flatboat was finished at New Salem, it 
was necessary to have a canoe that was to trail along 
behind the boat. The canoe was made from a dug- 
out log. When it was shoved into the booming San- 



SMALL BEGINNINGS 49 

gamon river, his two friends, John Seamon and Wal- 
ter Carmen, sprang into it for the first ride, but 
the stream was too swift for them. The current be- 
gan to sweep them away down stream. 

''Head up stream," Lincohi shouted, "and work 
back to shore." 

But they could not beat the rush of water. Near- 
ing the wreck of an old flatboat, they tried to pull 
the canoe in among the timbers and hold themselves 
fast. Seamon caught hold of a stanchion as they 
came by and the canoe was overturned, leaving Sea- 
mon clinging to the timber and Carmon being borne 
down stream, clinging to the slippery log. 

Lincoln yelled for Carmon to swim for the 
branches of an elm tree that swung in the high water 
near the shore. Carmon did this. Lincoln then 
called to Seamon to swim for the tree with Carmon 
and they could be rescued together. 

It was a very cold April day and the men were in 
danger of becoming too benumbed to hold on. By 
this time the whole village of New Salem was gath- 
ered at the bank. 

Lincoln procured a rope, which he fastened to a 
large log. The log was pushed into the water and a 
venturesome young fellow named Jim Darrell be- 
strode the log that was to be floated down stream to 
the rescue. 



50 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

The log went straight to the tree all right, but the 
young man was too eager to help his fellows. In 
the struggles the log was turned and so caught in 
the current that it was swept away from them and 
there were now three to be rescued from the tree. 

The log was towed back. Lincoln tied another 
rope to it, and held the end of the rope in his hand. 
He then mounted the log to take the dangerous ride 
himself. As the log came into the tree, he threw the 
rope around a limb and held fast. In another min- 
ute all three of the shipwrecked men were safely 
astride the log. He then told the people to let go 
the guiding rope. The well-calculated result was 
that the current against the log, and the pull on the 
rope fastened to the limb, swung them safely around 
to the shore. 

Strange and foreign as it may seem, numerous 
clear-headed exploits like this made his neighbors be- 
lieve in him. Such belief encouraged him to believe 
in himself, and, trivial as the analogy may seem, and 
unworthy as the comparison might be, it doubtless 
had much to do in strengthening his ambition to sur- 
pass his surroundings and gain the larger fields of 
service. It is said that no one ever learned faster 
in any situation than Lincoln. He never *'lost his 
head" in any whirl of events, and always before the 
crisis arrived he was facing it as master. 



SMALL BEGINNINGS 51 

Lincoln's raft from New Salem arrived in New 
Orleans in May, 1831. At that time it seemed as if 
all the adventurers in the world had gathered there, 
and it was probably the wickedest city on earth. It 
was the gathering place of pirates, robbers and wild 
boatmen of the river and gulf. 

The city in its wild prosperity and barbarity must 
have made a stron.2c impression on Lincoln. Worst 
of all was its hideous slave market. Here men and 
women were herded together like animals and sold 
like cattle. Here he saw negro girls, many of them 
nearly white, treated like beasts. At the auctioning 
off of a mulatto girl he turned away from the re- 
volting spectacle, saying to his companions, ''Boys, 
let's get away from this. If I ever get a chance 
to hit that thing (meaning slavery), I'll hit it hard." 

And to him was given the chance, through the ter- 
rible ordeal of civil war, to drive that shame forever 
from the land of freedom. Only in the light of twen- 
tieth century developments can we look back and see 
what a desperate condition America would be in if 
the Southern half of the United States had succeeded 
in becoming a separate slave-nation. Great evils 
were involved and great wrongs had to be worked 
out from among the passions and prejudice of the 
times, but we can now all believe, no matter how 
meritorious was state patriotism, or how sincere the 



52 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

faith of the people, or how correct their interpre- 
tation of the original Union, that we have a greater 
America, destined to take a better part in making 
a nobler civilization for a more progressive world. 



III. TESTS OF CHARACTER ON" THE LAWLESS FRONTIER 

There were gangs of good-natured rowdies, and 
there were roiighhouse communities in pioneer days. 

Such a community and such a gang was in the 
neighborhood of New Salem, known as Clary's 
Grove and the Clary Grove Boys. They delighted 
in being rough and coarse, though, it is said, to their 
credit, that they were generous and most faithful 
friend'?. 

Denton Offutt for some reason liked to boast to 
them of his hired man. He seemed to believe that it 
shed glory on himself as an employer. He told the 
Clary Boys that his man could lift more, throw far- 
ther, run faster, jump higher and wrestle better 
than any man in Sangamon County. This hurt the 
Clary boys' sense of superiority. They decided to 
test it out. Accordingly, they appointed Jack Arm- 
strong as their best man to prove their right to the 
championship. 

Lincoln objected to the ** tussle and scuffle '^ ideas 



TESTS OF CHARACTER 53 

of the time, he disbelieved in the honors won by 
"wooling and pulling," but the age of "fist-and- 
skull" duels was not j^ct at an end, and the question 
of best man had to be tried out. 

Clary's Grove came one day to back their man 
as representative of themselves, and New Salem 
turned out to back the other. It was to be "catch- 
as-catch-can and the l)ost man wins." 

The task to represent New Salem against the 
neighboring rowdydom was not an easy one. But 
such is human nature that who can say what effect 
it would have had on Lincoln's future if he had been 
beaten and bullied over in that fight. Perhaps it 
shows how needful it is to do well everything at hand 
to be done, because we do not know how it may be 
part of our way to the unknowable future. 

The champions came together according to the 
*'fair play" of the time. They clinched and swayed, 
those two strong men, but neither could be moved 
from his feet. Each side was yelling itself hoarse, 
as the one who was to l)e th(^ greatc^st of Americans 
strove with the one who would long ago be as for- 
gotten as his dust, except for the struggle he made 
and for the conquest. 

Feeling himself being defeated, one of them did 
not play the game fair. It was not Lincoln. The 
champion of the Clary gang played a trick, and 



54 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Lincoln caught him by the throat, holding him out 
at arm's length, where he could only kick, and squirm 
and beat the air, but could do nothing against that 
long, strong right arm. The Clary gang rushed to 
the rescue, and it looked as if he would have to fight 
them all when Armstrong declared that he had 
enough, and that Lincoln was the "best fellow that 
ever broke into camp." 

Not long after this the Clary gang elected Lin- 
coln as Captain of their sports and henceforth were 
among his most faithful friends. The fact that Lin- 
coln could hold the political support and good-will 
of both the best and the worst shows that there was 
a reliability in his character to which they could to- 
gether safely give allegiance. 

The friendship of Jack Armstrong and his family, 
after the fight, never swerved, and the time came 
when Lincoln repaid their kindness and their simple 
loyalty in a great way. Years afterward, when Lin- 
coln had become a renowned lawyer, Jack Arm- 
strong's son was accused of murder. They went for 
Lincoln and Lincoln came. He studied the case and 
became convinced that the son of his old friend was 
innocent. 

There had been a quarrel among some young men 
one night near an out-of-door camp meeting, and 
one had been stabbed to death. 



TESTS OF CHARACTER 55 

Young Armstrong was arrested on the testimony 
of one who claimed to have seen the blow struck by 
the light of the moon. 

Lincoln made the witness repeat his testimony 
about the moon and then began his address to the 
jury. He told of his relations to the prisoner's 
father, of the kindness of the mother, and how he 
had played with the boy as a child. Then he said 
that he was not there as paid attorney but as a friend 
of the family. With that explanation, he reviewed 
the testimony showing that all the evidence depended 
on what the witness had seen by the light of the 
moon. At this point he produced an almanac show- 
ing that there was no moon on the night of the mur- 
der. The jury took only a very short consultation 
to bring in a verdict of ''Not Guilty." 

This story has often been told in which the alma- 
nac is represented as having been an old one, thus 
winning the case hy a trick of falsehood, but inves- 
tigation has proven this to be untrue, accordingly 
supporting the statement that Lincoln never used 
such tactics to win a case. 

We have learned that no character in history can 
be understood except in relation to its surroundings. 
Otherwise, Lincoln's fight with the backwoods' ruf- 
fians might now seem vulgar and lawless, but it was 
in truth a powerful factor in building his life for 



56 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

its supreme service. It not only helped to establish 
his own conscious integrity, but it was planting re- 
spect for him among his neighbors, which was as 
necessary for his growth of reputation as anything 
at any time in his career. The time when a boy can 
a:fford not 'Ho care what people think" depends very 
much not only upon the boy and the people, but also 
upon what is meant by the 



IV. THE PIONEER MISSIONARY OF HUMANITY 

The pioneer West was indeed uncouth, but there 
were many noteworthy redeeming features in the 
zeal of the better classes for ideal interests. Doubt- 
less, Lincoln was often inspired by such a fair view 
of humanity. Many an incident is told of the unsel- 
fish devotion among the people with whom Lincoln 
lived. 

The zeal in having a mission in those days was 
something that is almost unimaginable in these days. 
It is illustrated by the following incident told by Mil- 
burn of the useful men of those days in touch with 
the Lincoln life. 

A young travelling preacher, and the preachers of 
that period in those regions were really all travel- 



' PIONEER MISSIONARY OF HUMANITY 57 

ling if they were preachers, for they had no abiding 
place, was so much beloved by a man who had ac- 
quired a large amount of land, that the man made 
the young preacher the present of a deed to half a 
section of land. The young man, being destitute, was 
much rejoiced to receive the gift of three hundred 
and twenty acres of good prairie soil. He went away 
with a grateful heart toward his generous benefactor. 
Three months later he returned, and, as he greeted 
the generous friend at the door, he handed back the 
deed, saying, ^'Here, sir, I want you to take back 
your title-deed." 

''Wliat's the matter," asked the surprised friend. 
'* Anything wrong with it?" 

"No," replied the young man, as if somewhat 
ashamed to give his reason. 

"Isn't the land good enough?" 

"Good as any in the state." 

"Are you afraid it is a sickly place?" 

"Healthy as anywhere." 

"Do 5'OU think I am sorry I gave it to you?" 

"I haven't the slightest reason to doubt your 
whole-hearted generosity. ' ' 

"Then why in the thunder don't you keep it?" in- 
quired the dumbfounded benefactor. 

"Well, sir, if I must tell you," said the young 
preacher, "you know I am very fond of singing, 



58 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

and there's one hymn in my book, which has been 
one of my greatest comforts in life, and it is not so 
any more. I have lost the joy of singing it, and it 
has killed so much other joy that I can no longer 
endure the privation. I will sing you one verse." 
Then he sang : 

^'No foot of land do I possess, 
No cottage in the wilderness ; 
A poor wayfaring man. 
I lodge awhile in tents below. 
And gladly wander to and fro. 
Till I my Canaan gain ; 
There is my house and portion fair. 
My treasure and my heart are there. 
And my abiding home." 

*' Please take your title-deed," he exclaimed. '*I 
want to have the joy I used to have in singing that 
song. I'd rather sing it with a clear conscience than 
to own America." 

It was among such people sacrificing themselves 
for humanity that Lincoln found his great inspira- 
tion from the sordid and mean that are ever to be 
found muckraking at the bottom. The family may 
be in a good home, safe for its children, but the good 
home must be in a good community or they are not 



EXPERIENCES IN THE INDIAN WAR 59 

safe. In fact, we cannot be sure of a good home un- 
less its good community is in a good world. Good 
people in a good community are of priceless help to 
a good mother bringing up a good boy, with the big- 
gest meaning of life in the word good. 



V. EXPERIENCES IN THE INDIAN WAR 

Great events probably have less effect in shaping 
one's life than the little incidents that compose them. 
It seems so with Lincoln. 

The confidence and appreciation of his friends 
(note that it was not his self-seeking aggressiveness) 
caused him to believe that he should try to become 
their representative in the state legislature. He was 
in the midst of this, his first political campaign, 
which was at the age of twenty-three, when Black 
Hawk, the Indian warrior, crossed the Mississippi 
River, April 6, 1832, with his five hundred followers 
and began what is known as the Black Hawk War. 

The white settlers had gradually occupied the In- 
dians* land, and the government by treaties had 
caused the Indians to be removed to territory west 
of the Mississippi. Black Hawk, a leader of the 
Sacs and Foxes, believed the Indians to be mistreated 



60 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

and so resolved to drive the white settlers back to 
the treaty line. 

'^My reason teaches me," he wrote to the govern- 
ment, 'Hhat land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit 
gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, 
as far as is necessary for their living; and so long 
as they occupy and cultivate it they have a right to 
the soil, but, if they willingly leave it, then any other 
people have a right to settle on it. Nothing can be 
sold but such things as can be carried away." 

There are now several social theories based on this 
idea that the earth belongs to the people w^ho use it. 
The theory of right things governs the minds of all 
who think, even of the wild men in the wilderness. 

When the news arrived that the Indians had de- 
clared war against the whites, with the appeal from 
Governor Reynolds for volunteers, Lincoln dropped 
his canvass for the legislature in order to enlist for 
the defense of his country. 

The man-making incident in this important event 
was Lincoln's election as captain of his home com- 
pany. If there had been one thing which Lincoln 
had not studied, that was the tactics of a soldier. 
He knew nothing about military orders, and yet the 
time was coming, all too soon, when he was to be chief 
of the greatest military organization then in the 
world. 



EXPEFIEXCES IX THE INDIAN WAR 61 

A sa^ATiiill o^Yller named Kilpatrick was pushing 
himself forward to be made captain. This man owed 
Lincohi two dollars for work and would not pay it. 

Lincoln got an idea and he said to his friend 
Greene, ''Bill, I believe I can now make Kilpatrick 
pay that two dollars he owes me. I'll run against 
him for captain." 

When it came to the vote, the two candidates stood 
out in the open, and the men were told to stand up 
by the man they wanted to be captain. More than 
three-fourths of them gathered around Lincoln, and 
he became Captain Lincoln. He tells us himself 
that he never had any success in life which gave him 
more satisfaction. It was a vote of confidence in 
the reality of a man. 

In telling of his ignorance of military command, he 
says that he was marching his company across a 
field when they came to a gate. ''I could not for 
the life of me remember the proper word of com- 
mand for getting my company endwise, so that the 
Line could get through the gate; so, as we came up 
to the gate, I shouted, 'This company is dismissed 
for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the 
other side of the gate.' " 

He was also totally unfamiliar with camp disci- 
pline, and he once had his sword taken from him for 
shooting^ off his rifle within limits. At another time 



62 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

his company stole some whisky, and, during the 
night, became so drunk that they could not fall in 
line the next morning. For this neglect of disci- 
pline Lincoln had to wear a wooden sword for two 
days. But his men respected him and were his de- 
voted friends. They knew he meant what he said, 
and whatever they saw of him was the truth. 

His firmness in the right ''as God gives us to see 
the right," even against his associates, is illustrated 
in the incident of saving an Indian's life. 

The frontiersman's standard of morality toward 
an Indian was that the only good Indian is a dead 
Indian. 

One day an Indian was brought into camp. He 
was trjdng to cross the country and return to his 
tribe. To do this was his privilege and General Cass 
had given him an order of safe conduct. But the 
frontiersmen had come out to kill Indians and this 
was their first chance. Lincoln stood up by the side 
of the red man, and boldly took the Indian's part. 
Some rebellious ones determined to take the Indian 
and kill him, even if they had to fight Lincoln to do 
it. But Lincoln stood up by the side of the red man 
and gave them to understand that it could be done 
only over his dead bod}". They knew that he meant 
it. The result was that the Indian was allowed to 
go his way, and the resolute Captain never lost a 



LIFE-MAKING DECISIONS 63 

friend for it. Many an act of mercy in keeping with 
this one has made his name beloved throughout the 
earth. His soldiering lasted three months, but it 
doubtless gave him many ideas for use in the greater 
events of after years. 



VI. LIFE-MAKING DECISIONS 

At the close of his unsuccessful canvass, in August 
of 1832, for the Illinois Assembly, he was out of any- 
thing to do, and he seriously considered the advice 
of his friends to become a blacksmith. This was a 
suitable trade for him, they said, because he was so 
strong armed. But this work gave him no leisure 
for study and he decided against it. The only thing 
he knew was store-keeping and he decided to buy a 
store. The opportunity was open for him to buy a 
half interest with William Berry and he did so, giv- 
ing notes for the goods. Business prospered rap- 
idly while the enthusiasm was on, but Berry loved 
whisky as much as Lincoln loved books, and between 
the one who squandered time and money on liquor, 
and the one who neglected business for books, there 
could not be expected any results more natural than 
that business should finally go to pieces. 

It was in the midst of these conditions that Berry 



64 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

took out a tavern license for the firm. It is under- 
stood that this was not for the purpose of keeping a 
liquor grocery, but to enable them to sell the stock 
on hand that had come to them from the stores they 
had bought out, and probably to get the much needed 
money to conduct their business. In those days a 
store could get no business if it had no liquor to 
sell. The personal morality of a thing must be con- 
sidered in relation to the times. The selling of liquor 
by the quart was then as unquestioned propriety as 
selling potatoes or flour. Liquor was sold in all gro- 
cery stores as a part of the general business of the 
store the same as tobacco or sugar. 

But it should be noted that the license was taken 
out in the name of Berry and that Lincoln's name 
was signed by some other person to the bond. 

Among the characteristic incidents told of Lincoln 
during this period is that of his encounter with a 
swaggering stranger who came into the store and 
used his choicest oaths in the presence of some 
women. Lincoln asked him to stop but he paid no 
attention. At the second request, more firmly given, 
he declared that nobody could dictate his style of lan- 
guage in a free country. 

''Well," said Lincoln, as the newcomer continued 
swearing, "if you must be whipped, I suppose I 
might as well whip you as any other man." 



LIFE-MAKING DECISIONS 65 

The man believed he could ''whip" Lincoln and 
vindicate the freedom of speech and the rights of 
man. According to his theory, right was on his side, 
and it could be vindicated by battle. Lincoln's more 
concrete object was to prevent swearing in the pres- 
ence of women. So they went outside to begin the 
war. The obliging persons present formed a ring 
around the combatants to insure fair play, and the 
freedom of decency began its war with the freedom 
of speech, according to the ancient wager of battle. 

New Salem had little doubt about which would 
win. In a minute Lincoln was rubbing smartweed 
into the eyes of the freedom of speech, and the rights 
of man was bellowing for mercy. 

New Salem was at bottom composed of real men 
and they liked that sort of thing. The champion of 
genuine human freedom and real rights in New Sa- 
lem was building his unknown way to be the cham- 
pion of the same fundamental human interests in the 
capital of his nation. 

It is very likely that those who feel little think 
even less, because those wideawake enough to think 
much must have imagination, which is the mother of 
sympath}^ Many stories are told of Lincoln's deep 
feeling of sympathy for those about him, and espe- 
cially he was the friend who believed in decency and 
loved moral order. 



66 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

"Honest Abe" is a name that would be generally 
regarded now as a "nickname" expressing a kind 
of good-natured contempt. Justice now wades deep 
streams in the adjustments of big business. But 
Abraham Lincoln had a musical soul and the color 
harmony of a great scenic artist for humanity. He 
might not have an eye for fitness in clothes or the 
idealism of pretty things, but his soul was in pain 
over any mistreatment of human beings. He could 
not endure the discordant note in any dishonest 
transaction, and he could not stand for any blur on 
the canvas in the scenes of mercy and justice. Like 
great standards of right-life waving in the breeze 
were many acts of Lincoln endearing him to the con- 
fidence of his people. As an illustration may be men- 
tioned the incident of his taking six and a quarter 
cents too much from a customer. He walked three 
miles in the evening after the store closed, in order 
to restore the money. Another time he weighed out 
half a pound of tea and afterward discovered that 
a four-ounce weight had been on the scales. He 
weighed out the extra four ounces and closed the 
store so he could promptly deliver the remainder of 
the tea. This was probably poor business, but it 
meant much for human liberty that the people be- 
lieved in him, and that he always made good in ful- 
fillment of that belief. 



LIFE-MAKING DECISIONS 67 

Any one doing these things now would very likely 
be playing the game of getting a reputation for hon- 
esty as the best policy for the sake of the policy, and 
if he required such strictness of dealing with him- 
self he would be regarded merely as a miser. Only 
bankers, the post office and big business are expected 
legitimately to hunt for the lost cent all night be- 
fore the account books can be closed. But this was 
Lincoln's whole life and his neighbors knew it. 
They told other people that he was a man to be 
trusted until at last the whole world knew it, and 
the historians recorded it among the imperishable 
records of civilization. 

A nation is rich as it has such ideals of character, 
especially in this kind striving on from the lowliest 
to the highest, through the destitution and discour- 
agement that may drag down the aspiring dream of 
better life. 

Robert Browning appreciates the honored names 
when he says, 

"A nation is but an attempt of many, 
To rise to the completer life of one ; 
And they who live as models for the mass 
Are simply of more value than they all." 



CHAPTER V 

I. BUSINESS NOT HARMONIOUS WITH THE STRUGGLE 
FOR LEARNING 

The people believed in Lincoln and that made him 
believe in himself, but they would never have be- 
lieved in him if they had not seen the unchanging 
conduct that is necessary for human confidence. If 
the people had not believed in him he would never 
have had the confidence to develop his way of life, 
able at last to face the world-making problems of the 
great Civil War, and thus to hold to a course of con- 
duct, which he knew to be right, against the hisses, 
slander and desperate intrigue of men and masses, 
who knew that he was making a civilization in Amer- 
ica contrary to their mercenary interests and their 
customary moral standards. 

Business men are devoted to the business game. 
Otherwise the play is poor business. So, the man 
whose happiness was in learning could not be a busi- 
ness man. The store did not pay. As Lincoln was 
compelled to earn his living at other work, the man- 

68 



BUSINESS NOT HARMONIOUS 69 

agement of the store was entirely in the hands of 
Berry, with whom it went from bad to worse until 
two brothers offered to buy out the business. The 
store was sold, not for cash, but for notes covering 
the amount. 

When the notes became due, the two brothers fled. 
The store was closed by the creditors, the goods were 
auctioned off, and a heavy remaining debt was 
against Berry and Lincoln. Soon after this Berry 
died and all the debt was against Lincoln. Now was 
the time for him *Ho skip the country," as was the 
custom. But he did not ''clear out" and therewith 
beat his creditors out of the debt of eleven hundred 
dollars. 

Lincoln told a friend that this debt, in many ways 
an unjust one, because he did not make it, was ''the 
greatest obstacle I ever met in life. I had no way 
of speculating, and could not earn money, except by 
labor; and to earn by labor eleven hundred dollars, 
besides the interest and my living, seemed the work 
of a lifetime. ' ' It did, indeed, take all he could earn 
above his living for seventeen years. But he did it. 
He paid the debt in full. The moral system in his 
soul was never sold for the mess of pottage in any 
temporary distress. "To thyself be true," says 
Shakespeare, "and it follows, as the night the day, 
thou canst not be false to any man." Many think 



70 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

themselves to be an emotion, or a tired feeling, or a 
fool ambition, or a will to do something, but it is 
not so. My self is a system, an identity, an integ- 
rity, a consistency, that has no hour, or day, or year, 
but at least a life time. 

One of Lincoln's creditors, who was like Shylock, 
demanded his exact dues the exact time they were 
due. He sued Lincoln and got judgment, so that 
the surveyor's tools, and every thing* by which he 
made his living were seized and put up for sale by 
auction. 

Lincoln's friends gathered at the sale without say- 
ing anything about what they would or would not 
do. The demand was for one hundred and twenty 
dollars. Very few could spare any such sum. But 
the things, horse, saddle, surveying instruments, etc., 
were all bought in by James Short, a farmer living 
on Sand Ridge, just north of New Salem. Then this 
farmer turned them all over to Lincoln. That be- 
nevolent farmer did not know what he was doing 
for his country when he did that, but it was a great 
deed. 

A few years later James Short moved out to Cali- 
fornia. For some reason he had lost most of his 
property and had become a poor man. When Lin- 
coln became president he heard of the distress "Un- 
cle Jimmy" was in and one day the old man received 



MAKING A LIVING 71 

a letter from Washington. Opening it, he found an 
appointment from Lincoln as commissioner to the 
Indians. 



n. MAKING A LIVING AND LEARNING THE MEANING OF 
LIFE 

Lincoln belonged to the Whig political party, but 
he ^Yas appointed postmaster by the Democratic ad- 
ministration in 1833. That there was not much mail 
m?ij be inferred from the fact that it would cost 
twenty-five cents, in those scarce times, to send a 
letter or the ordinary magazine of today from any 
distance around of four hundred miles. His kindli- 
ness of spirit is well illustrated in the fact that he 
delivered most of the mail himself, knowing how 
precious it was to the person addressed. 

As postmaster, Lincoln had to make an accounting 
to the government for its share of money received, 
and this was to be receipted for by the postoffice 
agent. There was much chance for graft, and espe- 
cially so in this case, as the agent to settle the busi- 
ness did not appear. It was not till Lincoln became 
a practicing lawyer in Springfield that the agent 



72 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

called upon him to close up his accounts as post- 
master at New Salem. 

The postoffice inspector produced a claim for 
seventeen dollars. Lincoln paused a moment as if 
perplexed to remember just what it was. A friend, 
seeing this, thought it was because Lincoln did not 
have the money, and so offered to lend him that 
amount. Without answering, Lincoln went to his 
trunk and brought out a package containing the ex- 
act amount, put away all that time, awaiting the busi- 
ness call of the postoffice agent. 

As he turned over the money and received the re- 
ceipt, he said, *'I never use any man's money but 
my own.'' 

It is interesting to note that both Washington and 
Lincoln became surveyors just before the opening 
of their great careers. It can be reasonably said 
that, by analogy, and even by contrast, they were 
also great surveyors for the rights of mankind. 

Sangamon County was settling up so rapidly that 
John Calhoun, the official surveyor, could not do 
the required work. He had heard of Lincoln as be- 
ing capable of doing almost anything required, so 
he sent for him to come and take the position of 
deputy surveyor. 

Lincoln, so far, had studied human beings and 
law. He knew nothing about mathematics, much 



OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 73 

less about surveying, probably not more than he 
knew about military tactics when he was elected cap- 
tain. But he knew he could learn what any one 
else had learned. He bought a book on surveying 
and stayed with it almost day and night. He bor- 
rowed wherever he could hear of a book on survey- 
ing. In six weeks he had mastered the subject so 
that the many surveys he afterward made were never 
disputed and were always found to be correct. 

It is said that he was too poor at first to buy a 
surveyor's chain and so used a grapevine. But even 
a grapevine in the hands of Lincoln told the truth 
about measurements, and the town of Petersburg, 
Illinois, is proud of having been surveyed and laid 
out by Lincoln. 



in. OUT OF THE WILDERNESS PATHS INTO THE GREAT 
HIGHWAY 

The Great Teacher in his * ' Sermon on the Mount, ' ' 
said, '' Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness, for they shall be filled." If that des- 
titute boy had not hungered and tJiirsted after right 
knowledge, the whole history of America, after his 
time, would have been different. But what boy would 



74 TEE STORY OF LINCOLN 

read, or what other boy ever did read such a book as 
the '' Revised Statutes of Indiana ?" To be sure, not 
the boy who is most interested in getting merely the 
most pleasure out of life, but the one who has a great 
desire to be useful and worthwhile in the world. 

The next book that deeply impressed his career 
and probably had most to do with developing him to 
influence profoundly the history of our country was 
that beginning of every lawyer's life, '^Blackstone's 
Commentaries/' 

This is the way Lincoln tells it himself: **One 
day a man, who was migrating to the West, drove 
up in front of my store with a wagon which con- 
tained his family and household plunder. He asked 
me if I would buy an old barrel, for which he had 
no room in his wagon, which he said contained noth- 
ing of value. I did not want it, but, to oblige him, I 
bought it, and paid him, I think, a half-dollar. With- 
out further examination I put it away in the store, 
and forgot all about it. Some time after, in over- 
hauling things, I came upon the barrel, and, empty- 
ing it upon the floor to see what it contained, I found 
at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of 
Blackstone's Commentaries. I began reading those 
famous works and the more I read the more intensely 
interested I became. Never in my whole life was 
my mind so thoroughly absorbed." 



FIBST LAW CASES 75 

It was that interest which made the man and the 
great historical character of Lincoln. One lives ac- 
cording to his interest in life, and the meaning re- 
alized in him as humanity. 

In 1834 Lincoln again tried for the legislature, 
and this time was elected. This gave him his long 
desired opportunity to study law. He borrowed 
books and read them incessantly until he mastered 
them. He never studied law with any one, as was 
the custom in those days. He did not require a 
teacher to lay out or explain his mental tasks. 

To a young man who asked him, twenty years later, 
how to become a successful lawyer, he said, *'Get 
books. Read and study them carefully. Work, work, 
work is the main thing." 



IV. Lincoln's first law cases 

One of the first important law cases of Lincoln 
in its claims sounds remarkably like the unsolved 
problems of today, and shows how rights have to be 
developed year by year, how the public mind has to 
be built up from idea to idea like an individual mind. 

A public-spirited attempt was made to build a 



76 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

bridge across the upper Mississippi. The boatmen 
declared it to be an invasion of human rights, as 
they had vested interests at stake in the business 
they had built up, ferrying people across the river. 
They declared that a man was an enemy of the peo- 
ple who would try to destroy business. But Lincoln 
won the case against them in favor of building the 
bridge for the larger interest of the people. 

In another significant case he set a legal prec- 
edent. A negro girl had been sold in the free ter- 
ritory of Illinois. A note had been given for her 
but the maker of the note could not pay it when it 
became due and was sued for it. 

Lincoln defended the maker of the note on the 
ground that the note was invalid because a human 
being could not be bought and sold in Illinois. The 
case was carried to the Supreme Court, where it was 
decided that Lincoln's view of the case was correct 
law. 

Another experience has still greater significance as 
to the professional character of Lincoln. He was en- 
gaged as counsel in a reaper patent case. It was to 
be tried at Cincinnati. The opposing counsel was 
an eminent lawyer from the East. Lincoln's friends 
were eager for him to win this case, as it would give 
him great renown and prestige. 

His client had four hundred thousand dollars at 



FIBST LAW CASES 77, 

stake, an enormous sum at that time, and the capi- 
talist became frightened at the great talent arrayed 
against Lincoln. He called in the services of a cor- 
respondingly great Eastern lawyer, Edwin M. Stan- 
ton. This eminent man was shocked at the sight of 
his colleague, Lincoln. He took entire control of 
the case and not only ignored Lincoln, but openly 
insulted him. Lincoln, through an open door in the 
hotel, heard Stanton scornfully exclaim to the client 
who had employed Lincoln, ^'Wliere did that long- 
armed creature come from and what can he expect to 
do in this case?" 

At another time Stanton spoke of Lincoln as *'a 
long, lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty 
linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the 
perspiration had splotched wide stains that resem- 
bled a map of the continent.'' 

Lincoln, completely discouraged and thrown out of 
any possible council with a man thus against him, 
quit the case and sorrowfully returned to Illinois. 

And yet, only a few years later, in the great crisis 
of approaching disunion, Lincoln became President 
of the United States and he made Stanton his Secre- 
tary of War. Very soon Stanton learned to prize 
"the long-armed creature" as one of the noblest and 
greatest men in the world. No one of Lincoln's col-' 
leagues ever questioned his superior leadership a^ 



78 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

the supreme chief in a struggle profoundly affecting 
all civilization and human government. 

When we consider how Lincoln worked his way 
up, through such destitution of knowledge and 
means, in twenty-five years, from a five-dollar suit 
before a justice of the peace to a five-thousand-dollar 
fee before the Supreme Court of the United States, 
we know that such progress does not come about by 
accident nor political fortunes, but by sheer interest 
and work. 



V. THE MAN WHO COULD NOT LIVE FOR SELF ALONE 

Henry Cabot Lodge says, ** Lincoln could have 
said with absolute truth, as Seneca's Pilot says, in 
Montaigne's paraphrase, *0h, Neptune, thou mayest 
save me if thou wilt; thou mayest sink me if thou 
wilt ; but whatever may befall I shall hold my tiller 
true.' " 

The moral process of his life, in which the re- 
corded incidents are only way-marks, is the only 
worthwhile interest for the American youth or for 
the newcomer to our shores. 

Lincoln's life-creed may be taken from a state- 
ment he has made of his personal duty. '*I am not 
bound to win," he said, ''but I am bound to be true. 



NOT TO LIVE FOR SELF ALONE 79 

I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live 
up to the light I have. I must stand with anybody 
that stands right. I must stand with him while he is 
right, and I must part with him when he is wrong." 

That this does not mean infallible individual 
judgment executed at any cost as imperial individual 
will may be inferred from the beginning of the state- 
ment, but it does mean the infallible integrity of 
honest conscience and character. 

Lincoln had a conscience that was like harmony in 
music, and he could not uphold a wrong thing any 
more than he could intentionally use a wrong figure 
and hope to solve correctly his problem. 

As an illustrating incident, one of his clients 
wanted to bring suit against a widow with six chil- 
dren for six hundred dollars. 

"Yes," said Lincoln, "there is no reasonable doubt 
that I can win this case for you ; I can set the whole 
neighborhood at loggerheads ; I can greatly distress 
a widow and her six fatherless children, and thereby 
gain six hundred dollars for you which I can see be- 
longs to them with about as much right as to you, 
but I'll give you a little advice for nothing. Try 
some other way to get six hundred dollars." 

Like the rich man who went away so disturbed 
from the advice of Christ, this man went away sor- 
rowing. 



80 THE STOBY OF LINCOLN 

In another instance Lincoln started in with a case 
believing his client imiocent, then he reached the 
belief that the man was guilty. Turning to his asso- 
ciates in the case, he said, *' Sweet, this man is guilty. 
You defend him. I can't. ' ' The large fee in the case 
was forfeited, but his self-respect, that nobility 
which carried him through many great dark hours, 
was saved. 

Once, when out with his lawyer-companions, he 
climbed a tree, searching for a bird's nest, out of 
which two fledgelings had fallen. His companions 
made sport of him for giving so much time and work 
to such worthless things, but he exclaimed with such 
genuine feeling as to silence them, **I could not have 
gone to sleep in peace if I had not restored those lit- 
tle birds to their mother." 

Lincoln liked to argue, and, to pass the time in a 
certain stage-coach ride, he was arguing that every 
act, no matter how kind, was always prompted by a 
selfish motive. About this time the stage passed a 
ditch in which a pig was stuck fast in the mud. Lin- 
coln asked the driver to stop. He then jumped out 
and rescued the pig. 

The passenger with whom Lincoln had been ar- 
guing thought that he now had proof for his own 
side of the case. 

*'Now look here," he said as Lincoln climbed back 



NOT TO LIVE FOR SELF ALOXK 81 

into the stage, "you can't say that was a selfish act." 
"Yes, I can," replied Lincoln. "It was extremely 
selfish. If I had left that little fellow sticking in 
the mud, it would have made me uncomfortable till 
I forgot it. That's why I had to help him out." 

General Littlefield says that one day a client came 
in with a very profitable case for Lincoln. He told 
Lincoln his story. Lincoln listened a little while and 
his look went up to the ceiling in a very abstract 
way. Presently, he swung his chair around and said, 
"Well, you have a pretty good case in technical law, 
but a pretty bad one in equity and justice. You'll 
have to get some other fellow to win this case for 
you. I couldn't do it. If I was talking to the jury 
in favor of your case, I'd all the time be thinking, 
'Lincoln, you're a liar,' and I believe I'd forget my- 
self and say it out loud. ' ' 

Coleridge in his "Rhyme of the Ancient Mari- 
ner" might well have had Lincoln in mind when he 
wrote, 

" Farewell 1 Farewell I but this I tell 
To thee, thou wedding guest! 
He prayeth well who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast. 



82 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

*'He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small 
For the dear God who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all." 

That was Lincoln's religion, to love his fellow- 
men and his country. In the turmoil of wrongs in- 
festing the confusions that were bewildering all 
minds at the close of the Civil War, all now know 
that both North and South lost the noblest and most 
valued friend, the ablest and wisest restorer, any- 
where to be found in all the vast regions of pain. 



CHAPTER VI 

I. HELPFULNESS AND KINDNESS OF A AVORTH-WHILE 
CHARACTER 

It would take a whole book to tell the stories of 
kindness and sympathy told by those who were neigh- 
bors and friends of Lincoln. All who knew him 
agree in saying how much he loved children and how 
considerate he was for the comfort of others. 

While living in the Rutledge tavern he often took 
upon himself all kinds of discomforts to accommo- 
date travellers. The Great Book says, "He who loses 
his life for my sake shall find it." Lincoln seemed 
most of the time to forget that he had any life of 
his own in trying to do good to others. Many times 
he served ungrateful people, and many persons mis- 
treated him who mistook his kindness for servility, 
but that didn't change Lincoln. He kept right on 
doing good to others, until at last he lost his life, 
in the full meaning of that phrase, but we may be 
sure that somewhere else he has found it. 

If a traveller became stuck in the mud, literally or 



84 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

figuratively, Lincoln always seemed to be the first 
to see his need. If widows and orphans were suffer- 
ing, he was the first to know it and relieve their 
wants. 

Deeds of kindness often look like ''bread cast upon 
the waters," but we are assured that such is not lost, 
for it ''shall return after many days." 

The effective way in w^hicli Lincoln sometimes 
turned upon those who "run him down" by sarcas- 
tic references to his poverty or looks is illustrated 
by his reply to George Forquer. Lincoln was to 
make his first speech in the Court House at Spring- 
field, and he was to be answered by Forquer, a rather 
aristocratic citizen of the town who had been a Whig, 
but who had recently turned over to the Democrats 
and received the appointment to an important office. 
Incidentally, he had also put up a lightning rod to 
protect his rather showy house, and this fact was 
quite well known, because it was the first lightning 
rod to be put upon a house in that county. 

Forquer rose to speak as Lincoln sat down, and 
his smile of derision seemed to show that he expected 
to demolish with ridicule the backwoodsman from 
New Salem. 

Turning to Lincoln, he said, ' ' The young man must 
be taken down, and I am truly sorry that the task 
devolves upon me." 



LOVE OF FREEDOM AND TRUTH 85 

He was a witty and sarcastic speaker. He did not 
try to argue but ridiculed Lincoln in the most offen- 
sive way. Lincoln's friends feared for this on- 
slaught, not knowing what Lincoln could say. But 
Lincoln said it so effectively in a few words, as he 
always seemed able to do, that his opponent lost and 
never recovered. 

In closing a very short reply, Lincoln said, point- 
ing his long, accusing finger at Forquer in a scathing 
rebuke : 

**Live long or die young, I would rather die now 
than, like this gentleman, change my politics, and 
with the change receive an office with a salary of 
three thousand dollars a year, and then feel obliged 
to erect a lightning rod over my house to protect a 
guilty conscience from the fear of an angry God." 



II. THE LOVE OF FREEDOM AND TRUTH 

Lincoln's fairness for all men, even when they 
were his opponents and the enemies of his cause, may 
be seen in his defense of Colonel Baker. 

There was a bitter political campaign in progress, 
and Colonel Baker was making a speech to a rough 



86 THE STOBY OF LINCOLN 

crowd in the courthouse. This building had been 
built to be a storehouse and directly over the speaker 
was a loft with a stairway near the speaker's stand. 
Lincoln was sitting on the platform above as a more 
convenient place to hear the speaker than from the 
crowded floor below. 

The speaker began to say things that annoyed the 
crowd. Suddenly the yell was raised to take him 
off the stand and put him out. The crowd surged 
forward when Lincoln's long legs were seen to swing 
over the edge of the opening at the head of the stairs 
as if he had no time to use the steps. He alighted 
on his feet by the speaker's side. 

''Gentlemen," cried Lincoln as he raised his hand 
to stop the oncoming rioters, "let us not disgrace the 
age and country in which we live. This is a land 
where the freedom of speech is guaranteed. Mr. 
Baker has a right to speak, and ought to be per- 
mitted to do so. I am here to protect him, and no 
man shall take him from this stand if I can pre- 
vent it." 

The sudden appearance of this champion of human 
rights dropping down from above so unexpectedly, 
his perfect calmness and fairness and the well-known 
fact that he was no idle boaster, quieted the out- 
break, and Colonel Baker finished his address in 
peace. 



LOVE OF FREEDOM AND TRUTH 87 

Joshua Speed tells how Lincoln rode into Spring- 
field on a borrowed horse to attend his first session 
of the legislature with all his earthly possessions 
packed into his saddle bags. Lincoln came into the 
store owned by Speed and asked the price of a bed- 
stead with its equipment of bedding. The price was 
named, Lincoln said that was no doubt cheap enough 
but that he could not buy it unless the storekeeper 
could wait for part of the pay until the money was 
earned. 

Speed was greatly impressed with the earnest 
young man. He offered to share with him the room 
which he used over the store. He pointed to the 
stairway leading up to the room. 

Lincoln went up the stairs and in a moment ap- 
peared at the stairway with beaming face. 

''Well, Speed," he said, ''I am moved." 

Thus he made friends of all persons at once and 
they were not fairweather friends, but lifetime 
friends. 

The homely old copybook text so familiar to our 
grandmothers, ''Beauty is as beauty does," applies 
well to the appearance of Lincoln, and to the first 
impressions received by those who saw him. Para- 
phrasing the poet, "none knew him but to love him, 
none knew him but to praise." He was like one 
transformed in the animation and zeal of express- 



88 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

ing his profound sentiments of freedom, humanity 
and truth. 

One who knew Lincohi well says, "He was one of 
the homeliest men ever seen when walking around, 
but while he was making a speech he was one of the 
handsomest men I have ever known." 



III. THE WIT-MAKERS AND THEIR WIT 

Lincoln's quick wit never contained any sting and 
he lost no friends by it. On one occasion several of 
his friends got into an argument about the proper 
proportions of the body. They could agree on their 
theories in all respects excepting the relative length 
of the legs. Lincoln listened gravely to their argu- 
ments, and, as usual, some one asked him his opinion. 

**It is of course one of the most important of 
problems, and doubtless was a source of great anxi- 
ety to the maker of man. But, after all is said and 
done, it is my opinion that man's lower limbs, in 
order to combine harmony and service, should be at 
least long enough to reach from his body to the 
ground. ' ' 

At another time a very unhandsome man stopped 
Lincoln and peered offensively into his face. 



WIT-MAKEUS AND THEIR WIT 89 

^'What seems to be the matter, my friend," in- 
quired Lincoln. 

*'Well," replied the stranger, *'I have always con- 
sidered it my duty if ever I came across a man uglier 
than myself to shoot him on the spot." 

Lincoln took his hand in friendly agreement. 

''Stranger, if this is really true, shoot me. If I 
thought I was uglier than you, I'd want to die." 

Senator Voorhees of Indiana said that he once 
heard Lincoln defeat a windy little pettifogging law- 
yer by telling a story. After showing how the fel- 
low's arguments were only empty words, he said, 
''He can't help it. Wlien his oratory begins it ex- 
hausts all his force of mind. The moment he be- 
gins to talk his mental operations cease. I never 
knew of but one thing that was similar to my friend 
in that respect. Back in the days when I was a 
keel boatman I became acquainted with a puffy lit- 
tle steamboat, which used to bustle and wheeze its 
way up and down the Sangamon River. It had a five- 
foot boiler and a seven-foot whistle, so that every 
time it whistled that boat stopped." 

Even in business Lincoln could not refrain from 
expressing himself in a humorous way. A New York 
firm \\Tote him to know the financial reliability of 
one of their customers. He replied: 

"I am well acquainted with your customer and 



90 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

know his circumstances. First, he has a wife and 
baby: these ought to be worth not less than $50,000 
to any man. Secondly, he has an office in which there 
is a table worth $1.50, and three chairs at, say, $1.00. 
*'Last of all, there is in one corner a large rat- 
hole, which will bear looking into. 

** Respectfully, 

''A. Lincoln." 



All the great contemporaries who heard Lincoln 
tell stories agree that he never told one merely for the 
sake of the story or to raise a laugh, but always to 
carry some useful point or impress an idea. The 
aptness and wit of his stories often were more con- 
vincing than any argument or logic. We may be 
assured that any other kind of a Lincoln story is 
spurious, and none of his. 

He had a case where two men had got into a fight. 
It was proven that Lincoln's man had merely de- 
fended himself against the other's attack. But the 
other attorney insisted that Lincoln's man could have 
defended himself less violently. 

Lincoln closed out the argument and won his case 
with a story. 

"That reminds me," said Lincoln, "of the man 
who was attacked by a farmer's dog. He defended 



TURBULENT TIMES 91 

himself so violently with a pitchfork that he killed 
the dog. 

'* 'Wliat made you kill my dogi' demanded the 
angry farmer. 

** 'Because he tried to bite me/ replied the victim. 

" 'Well, why didn't you go at him with the other 
end of the pitchfork'?' persisted the farmer. 

" 'Well, I would,' replied the man, 'if he had come 
at me with the other end of the dog/ '^ 



IV. TURBULENT TIMES AND SOCIAL STORMS 

One of the most singular, as well as undignified, 
experiences of Lincoln is closely involved in the most 
important measures of his life. This refers to the 
duel which he never fought with a man who was a 
stormy disturber for many years in many exalted 
yet unbecoming affairs. 

In 1840 Lincoln became engaged to Miss Mary 
Todd of Lexington, Kentucky, who was visiting her 
sister, Mrs. Ninian Edwards of Springfield. She 
came of a noted and rather aristocratic family of 
Kentucky. That two persons, so unlike in ancestry, 
in social experience, and in education, should be at- 
tracted to each other has seemed to be mystery 



92 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

enough to breed much speculation, a great number of 
curious stories, and much ungracious comment. 

Lincoln was aware of these differences as much 
as any one, and this, if there were no other cause, 
would account for his seeming uncertainties, his hesi- 
tation and the delays in his courting affairs which 
have been the source of so much elaboration and ex- 
planation. 

Lincoln had much social self-depreciation and he 
had a poetical fancy idealizing his own sensitive- 
ness toward women. It may well be concluded that 
his judgment was helplessly unsettled from the im- 
possibility of any foresight in a matter of such vital 
life-importance. The endless gossip that swarmed 
about Lincoln's love affairs may well be dismissed 
as worthless in the presence of the facts. 

Lincoln married Mary Todd November 4, 1842. 
During the summer before, in commercial and po- 
litical affairs, there had arisen the greatest dissatis- 
faction with the money-interests and currency of 
the state. The current money had depreciated to 
half its value. Though the people had to use that 
kind of money in all their transactions, the state 
officers required their salaries to be paid in gold. 

The auditor of the State was a young Irishman 
named James Shields. He was exceedingly vain, 
pompous and of violent temper. Therefore, he was 



TURBULENT TIMES 93 

a shining mark for the wit of those opposed to the 
present management of the state. 

In the ''Sangamo Journal" there appeared an ar- 
ticle of ^Yitty satire, ridiculing Shields and the finan- 
cial methods of his political associates. It was 
signed, ''Rebecca from Lost Townships." 

Shields became furious and demanded to fight the 
man responsible for it. The significance of this is 
rather in the peculiar popularity and yet unpopu- 
larity of such a man as Shields. His reckless adven- 
tures, his incessant boasting, and his whirlwind ca- 
reer of turmoil all loaded him with praise and ridi- 
cule for many a year. 

Shields went into the Mexican War and came 
out with his own brand of glory. But it won popu- 
larity enough to make him Senator of the United 
States. As an indication of his amazing character, 
he wrote a preposterous letter to the man he de- 
feated, declaring, that if Judge Breese had not been 
defeated. Shields would have killed him. 

It can be imagined what the fury of such a man 
must have been against the ''Rebecca" letters. 

The next week another "Rebecca" letter ap- 
peared which was this time unmistakably written by 
some mischief -loving woman. She offered to settle 
the quarrel by marrjdng the aggrieved gentleman. 
This w^as too much for Shields and he stormed the 



94 THE STOEY OF LINCOLN 

newspaper office to know whom he should hold re- 
sponsible for the *' Rebecca letters. '^ 



V. 



The public taste and the public requirements of 
its individuals change, as all know, from generation 
to generation. The development of Lincoln's life can 
be appreciated only as the community in which he 
lived is understood. The public custom is neces- 
sary to explain Lincoln's part in this peculiar epi- 
sode. 

The truth in this clownish affair was that Lincoln 
had written the first letter, and two young ladies, one 
of them Mary Todd, were the authors of the second 
letter. Mary Todd was at that time estranged from 
Lincoln, and probably did not know that he was the 
writer of the first ''Rebecca Letter." 

Shields sent his friend. General Whiteside, with 
a fiery demand to the editor of the paper to know 
the authors of the ''Rebecca letters." The editor at 
once consulted Lincoln, who told the editor to tell 
General Whitesides that Lincoln held himself re- 
sponsible for the "Rebecca letters." 

Nothing suited Shields better. He began at once 



THE FRONTIER ''FIRE EATER" 95 

to make public the most insulting letters to Lincoln 
and to issue the most fiery challenges to a duel. 

Though duelling was at that time forbidden by 
law, yet so strong was public opinion that the one 
who refused to fight a duel was branded as a coward 
and would not only lose his usefulness with the pub- 
lic, but his opponent would thus gain corresponding 
prestige. 

Lincoln so far conceded to this demand as to ac- 
cept the challenge, but on such terms as to make the 
battle ridiculous rather than heroic. He had the 
right to choose the weapons and the conditions, so 
he chose '* cavalry broadswords of the largest size,'* 
and the fight was to be "across a board platform six 
feet wide." 

Lincoln felt keenly the stupidity of the whole af- 
fair, but it would be degrading to his political stand- 
ing to refuse. Fortunately, Lincoln had a friend 
in Doctor Merryman, who was not only a witty 
writer, but he loved a fight, and he used his wit with 
a fervor that overwhelmed even such men as Shields 
and Whitesides in the final roundup. 

However, the duel progressed so far that the par- 
ties thereto went to Alton and crossed over to Mis- 
souri for the fight. But friends arrived and per- 
suaded Shields to withdraw the challenge. The next 
week Shields wrote a bombastic article in the *'San- 



96 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

gamo Journal" crowning himself as a hero and Lin- 
coln as a coward. Then Dr. Merryman came to the 
rescue. The next week the "Sangamo Journal" had 
another version of the now ridiculous duel. It 
showed up the Shields' side as so utterly absurd that 
the humor and tragic aspect of the affair among such 
prominent people became the sensation of the day. 
General Wliitesides challenged Doctor Merryman 
and Merrjnnan responded, with the declaration that 
his selection would be rifles at close range in the 
nearby fields. This would not do, because duelists 
could not hold office in Illinois and Whitesides was 
fund commissioner. His boasts proved that he was 
not afraid to lose his life but he did not want to give 
up his fat office. 

The same thing happened to Shields. He chal- 
lenged Mr. Butler, one of Lincoln's close friends. 
Butler accepted at once, choosing ''to fight next 
morning at sunrise in Bob Allen's meadow, one hun- 
dred yards' distance with rifles." 

Shields declined. 

It was a burlesque and a comedy farce, and so it 
ingloriously ended. 

But Shields had no less singular luck than he had 
singular friends. He was commissioned Brigadier- 
General in the Mexican War while still holding a 
state office and before he had ever seen a day's ser- 



TO WHOM HONOB IS DUE 97 

vice. At Cerro-gordo he was wounded and that 
wound was doubtless what made him United States 
Senator from Illinois. After serving one term in 
constant commotion with his associates, he removed 
to Minnesota and from there was returned to the 
Senate of the United States. 

In the War of the Rebellion Lincoln appointed 
him Brigadier-General and he was again wounded 
in battle when his troops defeated Stonewall 
Jackson. 

He moved into Missouri and from there was sent 
for the third time to the United States Senate. A 
few years later he became the subject of one of the 
bitterest and most disgraceful controversies in Con- 
gress over the question of voting him money and a 
pension. 



VI. HONOR TO W^HOM HONOR IS DUE 

Lincoln always seemed to be far more proud of 
his fist fight with Jack Armstrong of the Clary gang 
than of his near-duel with Shields and his political 
ring. He had many an occasion to refer to the Clary 
boys, but never to the Shields crowd. 



98 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

It was not Lincoln's disposition to have personal 
quarrels. 

Only one other is known. He got into a verbal 
encounter with a man named Anderson at Lawrence- 
ville. Anderson wrote him a harsh note demanding 
satisfaction. 

Lincoln replied, "Your note of yesterday is re- 
ceived. In the difficulty between us of which you 
speak you say you think I was the aggressor. I do 
not think I was. You say my words imported in- 
sult.' I meant them as a fair set-off to your own 
statements, and not otherwise ; and in that light alone 
I now wish you to understand them. You ask for 
my ^present feelings on the subject.' I entertain no 
unkind feeling toward you, and none of any sort 
upon the subject, except a sincere regret that I per- 
mitted myself to get into such altercation." 

Mr. Anderson was *' satisfied" and henceforth 
counted himself as one of Lincoln's friends. 

Another example shows Lincoln's idea of quar- 
rels. It ought to be impressed upon every boy's 
mind, as the belief of this great leader of men. 

In the midst of the war a young officer had been 
court-martialed for a quarrel with one of his asso- 
ciates, and Lincoln had to give him an official repri- 
mand. It was as follows : 

"The advice of a father to his son, * Beware of 



TO WHOM HONOR IS DUE 99 

entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bear it that the 
opposed may beware of thee!' is good, but not the 
best. Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make 
the most of himself can spare time for personal con- 
tention. Still less can he afford to take all the con- 
sequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and 
the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which 
you can show no more than equal right; and yield 
lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give 
your path to a dog than to be bitten by him in con- 
testing for the right. Even killing the dog would 
not cure the bite." 

But the Shields' quarrel and its skyrocket bur- 
lesque had another effect probably of priceless con- 
sequence to Lincoln. There was a certain whole- 
souled, self-effacing championship in it of the two 
girls who had written the last ''Rebecca letter." 
Mary Todd appreciated it, and she had to express 
her appreciation to the man whom she knew loved 
her, but who feared that he could not make her 
happy. Merely to be made happy is not all that a 
real woman of true womanhood is concerned with 
in her choice of a husband. Doubtless, she saw in 
him qualities to love rather than form or manners. 
She had abundance of time to consider all things 
and we may well believe that she was wise and good 
in her choice. Considering their differences, it is 



100 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

really a great testimony and tribute to her that so 
little could ever be found for cruel gossip about in- 
compatibility and unliappiness in the Lincoln house- 
hold. 

Mary Todd ignored the coldness that Lincoln's 
sensitiveness had brought between them, in the mu- 
tual adjustment of courtship, and she thanked him 
for keeping her out of the Shields' gossip and con- 
troversy. The coldness disappeared and never re- 
turned. They were married, and we must believe 
that humanity owes her a priceless debt, that she was 
one of the three great souls who made the immortal 
man, that together in glory are three great names, 
Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sarah Bush Lincoln and 
Mary Todd Lincoln. 



CHAPTER VII 

I. SIMPLICITY AND SYMPATHY ESSENTIAL TO GENUINE 
CHARACTER 

Greatness of mind, valued as worth while in his- 
torical characters, has always been characterized by 
simplicity and sympathj^, especially as interested in 
children and in those without means for the needs 
of life. Lincoln said pityingly of the poor that the 
Lord surely loved them because he had made so 
many. 

That Lincoln understood children and could talk 
to them is shown in his visit to Five Points Mission, 
then the most miserable spot in all the poverty- 
stricken sections of New York City. No one knows 
why he went there, alone and unannounced. Per- 
haps, knowing what was the lowest possible poverty 
in the frontier forests, he wanted to see what it was 
in the midst of the greatest wealth in America. 

The manager of the Mission, seeing a stranger, in 
the rear of the house, who had been such an earnest 
listener to their exercises, asked him if he would like 
to speak a few words to the children. 
101 



102 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

We can hardly imagine his feelings as he arose 
to speak to those suffering little ones, so like his own 
hard childliood and yet subject to such different 
causes and conditions. 

Feeling that he had used up his time, after speak- 
ing a few minutes, he stopped but they urged him 
to go on. Several times he ended his talk, but every 
time they cried out so persistently for him to go on 
that he spoke to them long over time. 

No one knew who he was, but so impressive had 
been what he said that one of the teachers caught 
him at the door, begging to know his name. He re- 
plied simply, ** Abraham Lincoln of Illinois." 

Adversity only made Lincoln stronger. In the 
midst of defeat he was at his best. In the midst of 
great moral success, in the profound trials of his 
country, his heart was mild and gentle as a child, 
and his eyes misty with supreme dreams of beauty 
and peace to lessen the suffering of humanity. 

Once when Lincoln was speaking for Fremont, a 
brazen voice in the audience roared out above his 
own, "Is it true, Mr. Lincoln, that you came into the 
state barefoot and driving a yoke of oxen?" 

The interruption had come in the midst of his 
strongest argument and was intended to throw him 
off of his subject. 

His reply came back with a bound that it was true 



NEARING THE HEIGHTS 103 

and he believed he could prove it by at least a dozen 
men in the audience more respectable than the 
speaker. Then he seemed inspired by the question 
into a vision of this country as the home of the free 
and the land of opportunity. 

In a great burst of eloquence, that carried the peo- 
ple with him, he showed how oppression had injured 
the oppressor as much as the oppressed, even as 
slavery had injured the master as it did the slave. 

**We will speak for freedom and against slavery,'' 
he said, ''as long as the Constitution of our coun- 
try guarantees free speech, until everywhere on this 
wide land the sun shall shine, and the rain shall fall, 
and the wind shall blow upon no man who goes forth 
to unrequited toil." 

This was before he had spoken in New York, where 
his speech at the Cooper Institute awoke the peo- 
ple of the Eastern States to realize that an intellec- 
tual political giant had at last come out of the West. 



n. NEARING THE HEIGHTS OF A PUBLIC CAREER 

Lincoln's long struggle to know and to be worth 
while culminated at last in a political career. The 
good opinion of associates grew into the favorable 



104 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

friendship of his neighbors and that confidence wid- 
ened to the community, then to the political district 
and so on. 

In this age when thousands of dollars, and, in some 
instances, many hundred thousands of dollars used 
for campaign expenses is a common occurrence, it 
is interesting to read how Lincoln managed such 
things. He was elected four times to the Illinois 
legislature. One time the "Wliigs made up two hun- 
dred dollars to pay his campaign expenses. After 
the election he returned one hundred and ninety-nine 
dollars and twenty-five cents, to be given back to the 
subscribers, in which he explained, ^'I did not need 
the money. I made the canvass on my own horse; 
my entertainment, being at the house of friends, cost 
me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy-five 
cents for a barrel of cider, which some farm hands 
insisted I should treat them to.'' 

The history of Lincoln's political battles belongs 
to those who would comment on his part in public 
affairs. We are interested here in a moral consid- 
eration of what built him up to a life used in the 
preservation of his nation, the intimate personal in- 
terests of his wonderful story, and how he stands as 
an ideal character of American manhood. 

It is therefore sufficient for us to pass over the 
great political struggles that proved him to be the 



NEARING THE HEIGHTS 105 

''Giant of the West," and begin with him on the 
way to the Wliite House. 

Lincohi was not exactly as the prophet without 
honor in his own country, for he was beloved wher- 
ever he was known, but his neighbors were struck 
with surprise when he was nominated to be Presi- 
dent of the United States. 

One fine old gentleman, recently settled in Spring- 
field from England, who had l^rought his old coun- 
try ideas of propriety with him, was covered with 
astonishment. 

''Wliat!" he exclaimed, ''Abe Lincoln nominated 
for President of the United States! A man that 
buys a ten-cent beefsteak for his brer.kfast, and car- 
ries it home himself! How is it possible!" 

Lincoln's vision of himself, expressed during a de- 
bate with Douglas, was not much more hopeful. 
Ponder over these words in which Lincoln with min- 
gled humor, pathos and insight contrasted his own 
appearance with that of his adversary in the famous 
debates : 

"There is still another disadvantage under which 
we labor. ... It arises out of the relative positions 
of the two persons who stand before the State as 
candidates for the Senate. Senator Douglas is of 
world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of 
his party . . . have been looking upon him as cer- 



106 TEE STORY OF LINCOLN 

tainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the 
United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, 
fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships 
and Cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign 
missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful 
exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy 
hands. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected 
me to be President. In my poor lean, lank face no- 
body has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting 
out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, 
that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight 
this battle upon principle and upon principle alone." 

But the people were in earnest. It was realized 
by all that the fundamental interests of American 
progress were in the midst of a great crisis. They 
needed a reliable man and Lincoln was that man. 

Campaign songs are usually very flat reading after 
the campaign is over, but they were then the car- 
riers of the enthusiasm for a great cause. 

The song sung in the state nominating-convention 
at Springfield, Illinois, had for its first verse and 
chorus the following lines: 

**Hark I Hark I a signal gun is heard. 
Just beyond the fort ; 
The good old Ship of State, my boys, 
Is coming into port. 



MOMENTOUS TIMES 107 

With shattered sails and anchors gone, 
I fear the rogues will strand her ; 
She carries now a sorry crew, 
And needs a new commander. 

Chorus 
''Our Lincoln is the man I 
Our Lincoln is the manl 
With a sturdy mate 
From the Pine-Tree State, 
Our Lincoln is the manl'' 



III. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF MOMENTOUS TIMES 

Reference to a few of his speeches, made before 
his election to the presidency, will give a clear idea 
of his political Americanism, to which was entrusted 
the definition and the destiny of the greatest democ- 
racy in the world. 

The Illinois legislature of 1854, by the union of 
Whigs and Know-Nothings, indorsed him for sena- 
tor and sent a committee to notify him. The Know- 
Nothings were especially strong on the slogan of 
"America for Americans," and wanted to shut out 
immigration. 



108 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

In the reply to the delegation or committee of no- 
tification, he said, ''Who are the native Americans'? 
Do they not wear the breech-clout and carry a toma- 
hawk! Gentlemen, your principle is wrong. It is 
not American. For instance, I had an Irishman 
named Patrick working my garden. One morning 
I went out to see how Pat was getting along. 

*' *Mr. Lincoln,' he said, 'what d'ye think of these 
Know-Nothing fellers ?' I explained their ideas and 
asked him if he had been born in America. 

'' 'Faith, to be sure,' Pat replied, 'I wanted to 
be, very much, but me mother wouldn't let me. It's 
no fault of mine.' " 

Lincoln and Pat thus together believed that every 
baby, born anywhere on earth, is a good American 
until its mind is moulded into some man-made shape. 

Referring to the thirteen original colonies and 
what they stood for, he said, "These communities by 
their representatives in old Independence Hall said 
to the world of men: 'We hold these truths to be 
self-evident, that all men are created equal; that 
they are endowed by their Creator with certain in- 
alienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness.' This was their lofty 
and wise and noble understanding of the justice of 
the Creator to his creatures. In their enlightened 
belief nothing stamped with the Divine image and 



MOMENTOUS TUIES 109 

likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on 
and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They 
grasped not only the race of men then living, but 
they reached forward and seized upon the farthest 
posterity. They created a beacon to guide their chil- 
dren and their children's children, and the count- 
less myriads who should inhabit the earth in other 
ages." 

Among the many familiar quotations from these 
great speeches that made him known to the nation 
may be mentioned a few that should never be for- 
gotten. 



"Let none falter who believes he is right.'* 
*^Let us have faith that right makes might.'' 
"Freedom is the last, best hope of earth." 
"Disenthrall ourselves, then we shall save our- 
selves." 

"Come what will, I'll keep my faith with friend 
and foe." 

"For those who like that sort of thing, that is the 
sort of thing they like." 

"I do not think much of a man who is not wiser 
today than he was yesterday." 

"No man is good enough to govern another with- 
out the other's consent." 



110 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 



"Would you undertake to disprove a proposition 
in Euclid by calling Euclid a liar!" 

''Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage 
and you prepare your own limbs to wear them." 

In pioneer days it was very common for individ- 
uals to conclude any personal controversy by resort 
to the settlement of *'fist and skull," and, on the far 
frontier of the Wild West, the convincing evidence 
that brought peace was often the quickest and most 
skillful use of the gun. 

We are now in that pioneer day and wild-west 
age of nations whose "fist and skull" arguments and 
wild- west "gun-play" must end. This is what Lin- 
coln thought of it in the midst of the Civil War. It 
was written to the Springfield convention. 

"Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I 
hope it will come soon and come to stay; and so 
come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. 
It will then have been proved that among freemen 
there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to 
the bullet, and that they who take such an appeal are 
sure to lose their case and pay the cost. ' ' 

It is interesting here, as he came up out of the 
darkness into the dawn of his supreme humanity, to 
know what the greatest men of his times thought of 
him, when that great day of human service closed 



MOMENTOUS TIMES 111 

clo^vll over him, in the martyrdom of assassination. 
It is not eulog}', but an estimate of values in a per- 
sonality, and as appreciation of righteousness ex- 
alting a man into an ideal of his age. 

Lord Beaconsfield, addressing the House of Com- 
mons, said, "In the life of Lincoln there is some- 
thing so homely and so innocent that it takes the sub- 
ject, as it were, out of the pomp of history, and out 
of the ceremonial of diplomacy. It touches the heart 
of nations, and appeals to the domestic sentiments 
of mankind." 

John Stuart Mill, one of the most distinguished 
philosophers of the last century, speaks in his writ- 
ings of Lincoln as ''The great citizen who afforded 
so noble an example of the qualities befitting the first 
magistrate of a free people, and who, in the most 
trying circumstances, won the admiration of all who 
appreciate uprightness and love freedom." 

D'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation, 
wrote, 

"While not venturing to compare him to the great 
sacrifice of Golgotha, which gave liberty to the cap- 
tive, is it not just to recall the word of the apostle 
John (I John 3 : 16) : "Hereby perceive we the love 
of God, because he laid down his life for us : and we 
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.'' 
Among the legacies which Lincoln leaves to us, we 



112 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

shall all regard as the most precious his spirit of 
equity, of moderation, and of peace, according to 
which he will still preside, if I may so speak, over 
the destinies of your great nation/' 



IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF GREAT TRAGEDY 

As we all now know, there was never a more fear- 
less man than Abraham Lincoln, but so bitter and 
so threatening were his enemies that it was believed 
by his friends that the Presidency should not be en- 
dangered by taking any chances as to his assassina- 
tion on the way to Washington, for his inauguration. 
Open boasts were widely made that he would never 
be inaugurated. Assassination was especially threat- 
ened if he should pass through Baltimore, and it was 
thought best by the managers of his transportation 
that it should not be known when he passed through 
Baltimore. 

Evidence was uncovered that a band of sworn as- 
sassins, headed by a man calling himself Orsini, was 
to throw the train from the track somewhere be- 
tween Philadelphia and Baltimore, and then do their 
monstrous deed. If this failed, they were to mingle 
with the crow^ds about the carriage and at the first 



THE BEGINNINGS OF GREAT TRAGEDY 113 

chance assassinate him, by discharging pistols at 
him and then throwing hand grenades. In the con- 
fusion they expected to make their escape to a ves- 
sel awaiting them in the harbor. 

The plot was defeated by the managers of the jour- 
ney sending Lincoln back to Philadelphia from Har- 
risburg, while all who might be watching him as spies 
for the plotters thought him to be asleep in a Har- 
risburg hotel. At Philadelphia he was placed on 
board a night train for Washington, where he ar- 
rived safely the next morning. 

It was here at Baltimore, where there was such 
opposition to the preservation of the Union, that a 
delegation was some time later sent to Lincoln, de- 
manding that no more troops pass through Mary- 
land. Lincoln replied that the troops had to go to 
their destination, and, since they could neither go 
under nor over Maryland, they would have to go 
through it. Another delegation demanded that all 
hostilities should cease, and the controversy be left 
in the hands of Congress, otherwise seventy-five 
thousand men would oppose any more troops going 
through Maryland. 

President Lincoln assured them that hostilities 
would not cease until the rebellion was ended, and 
that he supposed they had room on the soil of Mary- 
land to bury seventy-five thousand men. 



114 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

This unequivocal language ended such conferences 
and deputations. 

These stupendous difficulties crowding upon Lin- 
coln in the opening of the war, the opposition of pow- 
erful men, and the chaos into which the country had 
been thrown by the slavery agitation are subjects 
for political history, and were the trying out of the 
great soul which seemed to have been built up for 
that purpose from every experience in the living of 
men. 

General Scott had charge of the inaugural cere- 
monies and the baffled conspirators, scattered by the 
police, left their hideous work to be done for a no 
less monstrous purpose four years later. 



V. THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF A MAN" TRANSLATED INTO THE 
LIFE STRUGGLE OF A NATION" 

Lincoln, in his speeches before the beginning of 
the war, cleared the public mind as to the funda- 
mental issues and made it plain that the first sublime 
task was to save the Union. In a vague manner all 
men knew that the establishment of a national slave- 
labor absolutism in the South meant the develop- 
ment of an aristocratic slave-made oligarchy that 
would cause perpetual war, or, otherwise, bring about 



LIFE STRUGGLE OF A MAN 115 

the slave-holding mastery of America. Perhaps no 
clearer illustration of his mission, as he saw it, is in 
evidence than may be taken from one of the many 
characteristic incidents. While en route to Wash- 
ington for his first inauguration the train conveying 
Mr. Lincoln came to a temporary stop at Dunkirk, 
N. Y., and an old farmer in the crowd surrounding 
the train shouted: 

*'Mr. Lincoln, what are you going to do when you 
get to Washington?" 

Reaching for one of the little flags that decorated 
the train, he held it aloft and said : 

*'By the help of Almighty God and the assistance 
of the loyal people of this country I am going to up- 
hold and defend the Stars and Stripes. " 

The preservation of the Union, regardless of all 
the turmoil and clamor on other issues, was the one 
clear-sighted object of Lincoln. It is quite true that 
up to the beginning of the war there was little sen- 
timent in the North for the abolition of slavery. It 
was the beginning of war that crystalized resent- 
ment against slave-holding power, because it was 
thus capable of destroying the union in the further- 
ance of its own dominion. But never was a nation 
more divided into mutually injurious confusions. It 
is always so in democracies where eveiy one thinks, 
talks and acts. Authority was regarded as tyi'an- 



116 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

nical and Lincoln soon became widely berated as a 
despot. But his patience and devotion never 
swerved. He had already experienced the life-long 
lessons of holding true. The situation is well repre- 
sented in the way General McClellan treated Lin- 
coln. He began to show contempt for his comman- 
der-in-chief by causing Lincoln to wait outside 
like any other caller, and once he went to bed ignor- 
ing Lincoln's call. 

General McClellan seemed to believe himself so 
much greater than Lincoln that he more and more 
publicly ignored the President. When the mistreat- 
ment became notorious, Lincoln replied, ''I will hold 
McClellan 's horse if he will only bring success." 

''On to Richmond,'' was the cry of the nation, but 
McClellan remained preparing in what was bitterly 
called "masterly inactivity." 

Lincoln said one day sadly, ''McClellan is a great 
engineer, but his special talent is for a stationary 
engine." 

One of the popular songs of the time, reflecting the 
bitterness of the seemingly interminable delay, has 
for its first and last stanzas the following : 

"All quiet along the Potomac, they say, 
Except now and then a stray picket 
Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro, 
By a rifleman hid in the thicket. 



LIFE STRUGGLE OF A MAN 117 

*'His musket falls slack; his face, dark and grim, 
Grows gentle with memories tender, 
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep, 
For their mother, may Heaven defend her." 

Washington's struggle and patience against ad- 
versities and confusions, through his long career as 
leader in the making of the Union, was doubtless an 
ever present example and consolation to Lincoln in 
the no less stupendous task of preserving the Union. 

Laboulaye, the French Statesman says, ''History 
shows us the victory of force and stratagem much 
more than of justice, moderation and honesty. It is 
too often only the apotheosis of triumphant selfish- 
ness. There are noble and great exceptions ; happy 
those who can increase the number, and thus be- 
queath a noble and beneficent example to posterity. 
Mr. Lincoln is among these. He would willingly have 
repeated, after Franklin, that 'falsehood and artifice 
are the practice of fools, who have not wit enough 
to be honest. ' All his private and all his political life 
was inspired and directed by his profound faith in 
the omnipotence of virtue.'' 



118 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

VL. SOME HUMAN" INTERESTS MAKING LIGHTER THE 
BURDENS OF THE TROUBLED WAY 

Great minds always see a ridiculous aspect in the 
midst of every human crisis, even as Franklin did in 
the signing of the Declaration of Independence when 
he said, *'We must all hang together or we will all 
hang separately." 

The President on a certain occasion was feeling 
very ill and he sent for the doctor, who came and 
told him that he had a very mild form of smallpox. 

*^Is it contagious?" he asked. 

*'Yes, very contagious," replied the doctor. 

A visitor was present who was very anxious to be 
appointed to a certain office. On hearing what the 
doctor said, the visitor hastily arose. 

''Don't be in a hurry, sir," said Lincoln, as if very 
well intentioned toward him. 

''Thank you, sir, I'll call again," said the retreat- 
ing office seeker, as he vanished through the door. 

"Some people," said Lincoln, laughing at the hur- 
ried exit of his friend, "do not take kindly to my 
Emancipation Proclamation, but now I am happy 
to believe I have something that evervbody can 
take." 

Once, when Charles Sumner called upon him, he 
f omid Lincoln blacking his boots. 



SOME HUMAN INTERESTS 119 

''Why, Mr. President," he exclaimed, "do you 
black your own boots?" 

With a vigorous rub of the brush, the President 
replied, 

"Whose boots did you think I blacked?" 

The way Lincoln answered unjustified people is 
illustrated in his response to a delegation asking the 
appointment of a certain man to be commissioner to 
the Sandwich Islands. After praising his qualifi- 
cations for the place, they urged the plea of his bad 
health. 

The President said, "Gentlemen, I am sorry to 
say that there are eight other applicants for that 
place, and they are all sicker than your man." 

Lincoln, in the great receptions, often heard fiat- 
tering remarks that had been made short so as to be 
delivered quickly. But his apt replies were always 
equal to the remark. On one occasion, as the hand- 
shakers came by, an elderly gentleman from Buffalo 
said, "Up our way we believe in God and Abraham 
Lincoln." To which the President replied as he 
took the next hand, "My friend, you are more than 
half right." 

Somewhat similar is a noble reply of Lincoln to 
some over-zealous religious friends which has be- 
come justly famous. A clergyman, heading a dele- 
gation with one of the many immature and injudi- 



120 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

cious appeals, said sadly, "I hope, Mr. Lincoln, that 
the Lord is on our side." 

"I am not at all troubled about that," was the in- 
stant reply, ''for I know that the Lord is always on 
the side of right. But it is my constant anxiety and 
prayer that this nation and I should be on the Lord's 
side." 



CHAPTER VIII 

I. THE MAN AND THE CONFIDENCE OF THE PEOPLE 

Abraham Lincoln, as President of the United 
States and Commander-in-Chief of its army and 
navy, never seemed to know that he was any more 
bound to look out for the good opinion of the world 
than at any time before. To him there was no such 
thing as presidential attitude or pose. He did not 
see that he had any part to act out more than he had 
always had. Life might be a stage, as Shakespeare 
had described it, and Lincoln had played many parts, 
but it was always as a man. 

"Nothing was more marked in Lincoln's personal 
demeanor,'' says one of his intimate friends, "than 
his utter unconsciousness of his position. He never 
seemed aware that his place or his business was es- 
sentially different from that in which he had al- 
ways been engaged. All duties were alike to him. 
All called equally upon him for the best service of 
his mind and heart, and all were alike performed 
with a conscientious, single-hearted devotion." 
121 



122 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Mr. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, says, *'Tlie 
great predominating elements of Mr. Lincoln's pe- 
culiar character were : First, his great capacity and 
power of reason; second, his excellent understand- 
ing ; third, an exalted idea of the sense of right and 
equity; and, fourth, his intense veneration of what 
was true and good." 

Thackery expresses a vision of character that 
might well be used to describe the motive-interest of 
Lincoln, and every other youth who desires to be 
worth while: 

"Come wealth or want, come good or ill, 
Let old and young accept their part, 
And bow before this awful will. 
And bear it with an honest heart. 
Who misses or who wins the prize, — 
Go, lose or conquer as you can; 
But if you fail or if you rise, 
Be each, pray God, a gentleman." 

Tn that great address which he gave on the occa- 
sion of his being swown in the first time as Presi- 
dent of the United States, toward the close, he said, 
"Whj^ should there not be a patient confidence in 
the ultimate justice of the people *? Is there any 
better or equal hope in the world? In our present 







Lincoln ^lununicnt — ^iiringlicld. Jllinui.s. 



CONFIDENCE OF THE PEOPLE 123 

differences is either party without faith in being 
right? If the Almighty ruler of nations, with his 
eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the 
North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that 
justice will surely prevail, by the judgment of this 
great tribunal of the American people." 

At the last of his inaugural address he said, refer- 
ring to the people of the South, *'In your hands, my 
dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is 
the momentous issue of civil war. The government 
will not assail you. You can have no conflict with- 
out being yourselves the aggressors. You have no 
oath registered in Heaven to destroy the govern- 
ment; while I have the most solemn one to 'preserve, 
protect and defend' it." 

It was in 1840, when he set this standard that made 
him worthy of being called the savior of his nation. 
In a great political address at that time, he said, 
''Let it be my proud plume not that I was the last 
to desert (my country), but that I never deserted 
her." 

The result is a united and powerful America fac- 
ing the centuries of human posterity as a working 
place for the enlargement of freedom accomplished 
as rapidly as is possible through the perfection of 
character and civilization. 



124 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 



II. TYPICAL INCIDENTS FROM AMONG MOMENTOUS 
SCENES 

Lincoln's many forms of kindness are exemplified 
in such a continuous series of acts, during his period 
of almost unlimited political power, that only a few 
typical instances need to be described. 

One day a woman got past the doorkeeper and 
thrust herself into his presence. Her husband was 
captured and condemned to be shot. He was one of 
the hated Mosby guerillas. She had come to beg for 
his pardon. She weepingly poured out the story of 
his kindness, his love for his family and that they 
could hardly live without him. She said that she was 
a Northern woman, that she would take him to their 
home, and, on his parole and her promise, he should 
never again do harm to his country. She had papers 
also setting forth these facts. Lincoln examined 
them and decided to parole the husband in her care. 

At hearing this, the woman sobbed with joy as 
if her heart would burst with gratitude. 

*'My dear woman," said Lincoln, listening to her 
hysterical sobs, *'if I had known it would make you 
feel so bad as this, I would never have pardoned 
him.'' 



TYPICAL INCIDENTS 125 

''You do not understand me," she cried, fearful 
that he might reverse his decision. 

''Yes, I do," he replied, "but if you do not go 
awaj^ at once I shall soon be crying with you." 

The Judge Advocate General was one day review- 
ing death sentences with Lincoln when they came to 
one where a young soldier was to be shot for "cow- 
ardice in the face of the enemy. " He had hid behind 
a stump during battle. 

Lincoln drew out the paper and said, "This one 
I'll have to put with my bunch of leg cases." 

" 'Leg cases,' " said Judge Holt; "what do you 
mean by 'leg cases?' " 

"Do you see that bunch of papers in yonder 
pigeon-hole?" he replied. "Well, they are cases 
marked ' Cowardice in the face of the enemy. ' I call 
them, for short, my leg cases. I'll put it up to you 
for judgment : if Almighty God gives a boy a cow- 
ardly pair of legs, how can he help their running 
away with him." 

One of the instances, which was far from being 
either desertion or "Cowardice in the face of the 
enemy," came unexpectedly before him. A little 
woman of poverty-stricken clothing and pinched fea- 
tures, after several days trying, at last succeeded in 
getting through the press of people waiting to see 
Lincoln, and told him that her only son was about 



126 THE STOBY OF LINCOLN 

to be shot for desertion. His regiment had come by 
near their home, and, being refused leave of absence, 
he had gone without permission to see her. He had 
returned to his regiment but had been arrested, tried 
and ordered shot, and there was only one more day. 
She did not know where he was now confined. 

Lincoln examined the papers verifying her state- 
ments. He hastily arose from his chair, seized the 
woman by the hand, and, leaving the offices without 
a word, hastened over to the Secretary of War. 

Stanton, weary with Lincoln's constant interfer- 
ence against what the War Secretary believed to be 
necessary discipline, begged Lincoln to leave that 
matter to him. 

But Lincoln insisted. He gave directions that im- 
mediate messages be sent to every army headquar- 
ters till the boy be found and the execution stayed 
for his further orders. 

It was in a similar instance where mercy had been 
given to a New England mother that she came out 
from the interview silent, as if wi'apped in thought. 

Some friend interrupted her to know what had so 
impressed her. 

*'I have always been told," she said, "that Lincoln 
is one of the ugliest of men. I now know that to be 
a lie. He is one of the handsomest men I ever saw.'* 

In another case, when Lincoln had relieved the dis- 



KXrEIUimCES demanding mercy 127 

tross of an old man for his only son, the orders were 
tliat the soldier should not be executed until further 
orders from Lincoln. 

''But that is not pardon, is it?" said the fearing 
petitioner. 

''Well, it's just as good," replied Lincoln. "He 
will be older than ^Fethusclah before T ord<'r his ex- 
ecution. Killing a man doesn't make him any better 
or wipe out the act." 



in. EXPERIENCES DEMANDING MERCY AND NOT SACRI- 
FICE 

The kindness so exemplified throughout his life 
never failed on the side of mercy, as shown in many 
an incident of the war. 

In one case a woman, whose son had run away 
from home at the age of seventeen and joined the 
Confederacy, sought to have him released from Fort 
AlcIIenry, where he was in the hospital, a wounded 
prisoner. 

She applied to Stanton, Secretary of War. He 
refused to listen to her, saying, "I have no time to 
waste on you. If you have raised up a son to rebel 



128 TEE STORY OF LINCOLN 

against the best Government under the sun, you and 
he must take the consequences." 

She attempted to plead with him, but he very 
peremptorily ordered her to go, saying that he could 
do nothing for her. 

Friends asked her to go to see Lincoln, but, shar- 
ing in the Southern prejudice or misunderstanding 
of the President, she refused in despair, believing 
him to be more fierce than Stanton. But she was at 
last persuaded to try. 

With fear and trembling she came into his pres- 
ence, and in the greatest joy any woman can have 
she came away. 

''When I was permitted to go in to see him," she 
said, in describing the scene, *'he was alone. He 
immediately arose, with the most reassuring respect, 
and, pointing to a chair by his side, said, 'Take this 
seat. Madam, and tell me what I can do for you.' " 

She handed him, without speaking, a letter telling 
the truth about her son. He read it thoughtfully. 

"Do you believe he will honor his parole if I per- 
mit him to go with you, ' ' he said, with great kindness 
in his voice. 

"I am ready, Mr. President," she replied, "to peril 
my personal liberty that he will keep his parole." 

"You shall have your boy, my dear Madam," he 
said. "To take him from the ranks of rebellion and 



EXPERIENCES DEMANDING MERCY 129 

give him to a loyal mother is the best investment that 
can be made by this government." 

He handed her an order to give to the commanding 
officer at Fort McHenry. 

''May God grant," he fervently added, ''that your 
boy may prove a blessing to you and an honor to his 
country." 

Lincoln's interest in the lowly and their sacrifices 
for the Union has become classic in his letter to a 
Boston mother. A copy of this letter hangs on the 
wall in Brasenose College, Oxford University, Eng- 
land, as a model of pure and exquisite diction, which 
has never been excelled. 

"Dear Madam: 

"I have been snown in the files of the War De- 
partment a statement of the Adjutant-General of 
Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons 
who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel 
how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine 
which should attempt to beguile you from the grief 
of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain 
from tendering you the consolation that may be 
found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. 
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the 
anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the 
cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the sol- 



130 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

emn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly 
a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. 

** Yours sincerely and respectfully, 

*'A. Lincoln.'* 



IV. HUMANITY AND THE GREAT SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 

Many people in estimating Lincoln's scholarship 
do not sufficiently recognize how much an eager stu- 
dent of life can learn in such wide experience as his 
among men. To say that he was uneducated or that 
he was self-made are alike erroneous. He was truly 
entered in the school of experience in which he chose 
the wisest interest as his teacher, and from which he 
graduated as a martyred president, one of the wisest 
masters of humanity. 

It can hardly be said that Lincoln arrived slowly 
at a leadership of men. He was only twenty-eight 
when he was regarded as one of the most influential 
men in his State. The nation was then in the midst 
of the religious belief that God intended slavery or 
he would not have made men black. Even at that 
early period Lincoln, with the boldness of a Martin 
Luther, declared that ''the institution of slavery is 



TEE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 131 

founded both on injustice and bad policy," though 
the great reformation was not yet at hand. 

It is said that ''those in glass houses should not 
throw stones." Society and government have yet so 
many sins and wrongs to answer for that the people 
of slavery days can hardly be blamed for not seeing 
as we see now. Mankind seems to be only well started 
on the way to civilization. Now and then we are 
given a great far-seeing man and the vision of right- 
eousness is made a little clearer. We see a little far- 
ther through him into the promised land of a better 
world. 

To any one looking down upon the stormy United 
States of that period it could be seen that probably 
no one ever entered the presidency, and more prob- 
ably never would, who seemed so destitute of influ- 
ential associates and political supporters. It was 
Lincoln alone and his faith in the unseen faithful of 
his ancient Israel. He knew the people. He knew 
they understood what the great crisis in their coun- 
try's history meant for their ideals of America. 
They wanted a leader from among themselves, be- 
cause they no longer trusted the politicians in high 
places. 

In 1862 John James Piatt wrote : 



132 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

^* Stern be the Pilot in the Dreadful hour 
When a great nation, like a ship at sea, 
With the wroth breakers whitening at her lea, 
Feels her last shudder if the Helmsman cower ; 
A God-like manhood be his mighty dower!" 

This seems to show that the patriotic men of the 
literary East were not yet sure of him. In fact, it 
was not yet sure that there was any man anywhere 
who could remain sane and true through the rampant 
treason and raging strife. 

A year later Frank Moore wrote : 

** Stand like the rock that looks defiant 
Far o'er the surging seas that lash its form I 
Composed, determined, watchful, self-reliant, 
Be master of thyself and rule the storm." 

If the Americans who tried to destroy Washing- 
ton could now appear among us and see what we 
and the world think of him, they would hardly at- 
tempt to justify what they said and did to ruin him. 
Many lived to realize their error in defaming Lin- 
coln and to appreciate their pitiful malignity in 
spreading the gossip and slander about him. And 
yet a few strove on to save some of their reputation 
for intelligence or personal honor and honesty, until 



THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 133 

research and cumulative evidence established the un- 
assailable truth of his standing and character as one 
of the noblest and greatest of Americans. 

The lesson of personal justice and integrity is 
learned slowly where freedom has long seemed to 
mean political license to distort and defame party 
opponents. But election slanders die out as the peo- 
ple emerge from party possession and mastery. 
After the election is over, still increasing numbers 
become conscious that most of the evils told of the 
opposition have either been lies or the distorted half- 
truths that are more misleading to the honest-inten- 
tioned minds. 

But, fortunately, one of Lincoln's great sayings 
has been proven true even in the miscellaneous free- 
dom of Americans. To an insignificant interruption 
on an insignificant occasion, one of those famous say- 
ings popped up, as it were from the mass of think- 
ing in Lincoln's mind, *'You can fool some of the 
people all of the time, and all of the people some 
of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all 
of the time." 

Lincoln's great passion for friendship in the midst 
of his prophetic vision is shown in the last paragraph 
of his first inaugural address. He said, *'I am loath 
to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must 
not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, 



134 THE STOEY OF LINCOLN 

it must not break our bonds of affection. The mys- 
tic chords of memory, stretching from every battle- 
field and patriot grave to every living heart and 
hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell 
the chorus of the Union, when again touched as they 
surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.'^ 



V. SIMPLE INTERESTS THAT NEVER GROW OLD 

Lincoln's great sympathy for those who mourn 
is expressed in a letter of condolence to a friend 
whose father had just died. 

"Dear Fanny: 

''In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, 
and to the young it comes with bittered agony be- 
cause it takes them unawares. The older have 
learned ever to expect it. You cannot now realize 
that you will ever feel happier. Is this not so ? And 
yet, it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. 
To know this, which is certainly true, will make you 
some less miserable now. I have had experience 
enough to know what I say, and you need only to 
believe it to feel better at once. The memory of your 
dear father, instead of an agony, will be a sad, sweet 



SIMPLE INTERESTS 135 

feeling in your heart of a purer and holier sort than 
you have known before. 

"Your sincere friend, 

"A. Lincoln." 

His fatherly feeling toward childhood is shown 
in many stories of his younger son Tad. 

Little Tad had all the impetuosity of energetic 
childhood. His father's example of kindness once 
led him into conflict with the White House cook. 
Tad never saw a hungry-looking boy that he didn't 
invite him in to have something to eat. This gen- 
erosity was a light that could not be hid under a 
bushel. The number of hungry boys increased sur- 
prisingly. At last Peter, the cook, thought that Mrs. 
Lincoln must be told. He accordingly refused en- 
trance to a hungry bunch that Tad brought in. Tad 
was very angry that his benevolence and his author- 
ity should be thus disputed. He flew upstairs to see 
his mother, but she was nowhere to be found. At 
this crisis he saw his father coming up the yard with 
Secretary Seward. They were discussing some im- 
portant affairs of state, but that was insignificant in 
comparison with Tad's grievance. He ran out to 
carry his complaint to the head of the nation. 

** Father," he cried, running up to the Executive 
in Chief of the United States, "Peter won't let me 



136 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

feed these hungry boys. Two of them are boys of 
soldiers. Isn't it our kitchen? I'm going to dis- 
charge Peter. He doesn't obey orders." 

Secretary Seward was very much amused. 

The President turned to him as if much perplexed. 

''Seward," he said, "advise with me. This case 
requires great diplomacy." 

Mr. Seward patted Tad on the head and said, *'My 
boy, be careful that you don't run the government 
into debt." 

Then Lincoln took his little boy's hand in his, say- 
ing, ''Tell Peter that you really have to obey the 
Bible which tells you to feed the hungry, and that 
he ought to be a better Christian." 

Tad went to Peter with the astonishing news that 
his father didn't believe the White House cook was a 
Christian. 

The religious problem of "feeding the hungry" 
won quickly over the economic problem of White 
House expenses. Childhood was not defeated in its 
sympathies, and, like every other moral question, it 
was solved in the spirit of social democracy. 

Secretary Seward writes of this that in less than 
an hour they passed back through the j^ard on their 
way to a Cabinet meeting and about a dozen small 
boys were sitting on the kitchen steps having a state 
dinner at the expense of the government. 



SOME INCIDENTS 137 

VI. SOME INCIDENTS FROM THE GREAT YEARS 

Little incidents of appreciative consideration 
marked all of Lincoln's way. 

One afternoon in Chicago, while many noted vis- 
itors were gathered about him, a little boy entered 
the room, and, seeing Lincoln, took oH his cap, 
whirled it over his head and shouted, ''Hurrah for 
Lincoln!" 

Mr. Lincoln gently made his way through the 
crowd, picked the little boy up in his arms, held him 
out at arm's length, studied him a moment seri- 
ously, and then shouted, in like enthusiasm, as he set 
the boy down, ''Hurrah for you !" 

Honorable W. D. Kell tells an incident that oc- 
curred in asking Lincoln to do something for Willie 
Bladen. 

This boy had served a year on the gunboat Ottawa 
and had gone through two important battles. Willie 
lived in the district of Congressman Kell and he 
asked Kell to help him get a place in the Naval 
School. The testimony of the gunners on the Ot- 
taiva was that Willie had carried powder to them in 
the midst of the hottest engagements with all the 
coolness and bravery of any of the sailors, and Con- 
gressman Kell's sympathy was thoroughly enlisted 
for the boy's ambition. 



138 TEE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Lincoln was much interested in the case and at 
once wrote to the Secretary of the Navy to appoint 
Willie Bladen to the school, if there was yet a place 
for him. 

The appointment was made and the boy was or- 
dered to report in July. But Congressman Kell 
found, on going back home, that Willie would not be 
fourteen till September, and no one could be accepted 
in the Naval School under fourteen. 

Willie was terribly distressed. 

"Never mind," said Mr. Kell, "I'll take you to 
see the President about this and I am sure he will 
manage it some way." 

A few days later, Congressman Kell, holding 
Willie Bladen by the hand, walked in to where Lin- 
coln sat, and introduced the boy. 

Willie made a profound bow. 

"Why, bless me," responded Lincoln, "is this the 
boy who 4id so gallantly in those two great battles I 
I feel that I should bow to him." 

And, with that, Lincoln arose and made a bow to 
the little hero. 

The President then made out papers directing that 
the boy be allowed until September to report, then 
putting his hand on the boy's head, he said, "Now, 
my boy, go home and play for the next two months. 
They may be the last holidays you will ever get." 



139 

Lincoln's knowledge of the Bible is shown by 
many an incident. 

In one of the darkest hours of the war a mass con- 
vention was called of Union men to protest against 
the President's *' imbecile policy in the conduct of 
the war.'' It was also intended to start a boom for 
''Fremont the Pathfinder" to succeed Lincoln to 
the Presidency. Instead of a great mass convention 
of many thousands, only four hundred disgruntled 
politicians were present. 

When this news was brought to Lincoln, he 
reached for the Bible that always lay on his desk, 
and, turning to the first book of Samuel, the twenty- 
second chapter, read aloud, "And every one that was 
in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every 
one that was discontented gathered themselves unto 
him ; and he became a Captain over them : and there 
were with him about four hundred men." 

The old saying, originating from the Bible, "To 
have friends you must show yourself friendly," was 
always true in Lincoln's case. One of these friends 
once said of Lincoln that "he had nothing, only 
friends." His enemies did not know him or they 
would not have been enemies. 



CHAPTER IX 



James Oppenheim says: 

"The greatest are the simplest — 
They need be nothing else, 
It is the rest who have to play parts, 
To seem what they are not.'* 

War times and periods of great public agitation 
have always brought forth in every free country the 
most scurrilous and vicious denunciations and slan- 
ders of public men. Such vile vituperation of Wash- 
ington, Lincoln and others in our stormy periods, if 
all printed would make many volumes that bear in 
numerous instances the logical appearance of au- 
thentic history. But when sifted down, each to its 
origin, it is always what some one, long since gone 
from the possibility of explanation, has said, or been 
supposed to say, who might have known or might 
have misunderstood. 

140 



FALSEHOOD AIDS NO ONE'S TRUTH 141 

Every young man, if not every boy, sooner or later 
hears, as if indisputable, the most vulgar stories 
about men whom the world has enrolled as their no- 
blest benefactors. All the moral world then seems 
to go to pieces as these stories seem to be the truth. 
But it is a common evidence of the viciousness, the 
most degenerate and cowardly viciousness, that is 
thus seen to remain possible in the composition of 
common minds. Political perversions of the mean- 
ing and motives of public men are so common in elec- 
tion times that the only wonder is, the only reassur- 
ance is, how little the disease of slander prevails, 
and yet, alas, we may not see how much injury and 
despair it has caused and is causing in growing 
minds. Many delight in making respected people ap- 
pear filthy. Somehow, it satisfies and excuses their 
own brains and degenerate character. 

Many people vaguely know that an assertion may 
be wrong, they even more vaguely know what is the 
right thing, and, when some one appears to state 
clearly what is wrong, and to give a clear idea of 
what is right, and a clear vision of the right way, 
then he becomes the embodiment of the people and 
they follow him. It w^as thus that Lincoln was the 
superbly great man. In the days when Americanism 
was a mist and a fog in so many high places, Lin- 
coln stood forth as the embodied patriotism and mind 



142 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

of America. When men stormed around him with 
ideas as diverse as the wind, he was a soul high and 
clear as the unchanging sun. The storm-makers are 
gone, but Lincoln remains, unchanged, one of the 
beacon lights of mankind. 

Lincoln ^s favorite poem reflects the deep burden 
of his own soul. It is a long poem written by Wil- 
liam Knox, who was a much valued friend of Sir 
Walter Scott. 

Four of the stanzas are as follows : 

^^Ohl Why should the spirit of mortal be proud? 
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, 
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave. 
He x^asseth from life to his rest in the grave. 

"So the multitude goes like the flower or the weed, 
That withers away to let others succeed ; 
So the multitude comes — even these we behold. 
To repeat every tale that has often been told. 

"Yea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, 
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain; 
And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, 
Still follow each other, like surge upon surge. 



TO MISREPRESENT NOT FREEDOM 143 

* 'Tis the wink of an eye, — 'tis the draught of a 

breath ; 
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, 
From the gilded salon to the bier and the shroud ; 
O, why should the spirit of mortal be proud ! '/ 



II. FREEDOM TO MISREPRESENT IS NOT FREEDOM 

One of the great perils of the American republic, 
which makes progress so slow and misery so rich in 
victims, is the perversions which opponents put upon 
the words of public men, and the distortions which 
are given to their meaning. It is not only brutal, 
but to misshape righteous ideas is treason to those 
who receive them, and it brands such malefactors 
as criminal minds. The traitor and the liar are ab- 
horred, but somehow we have not yet classified the 
unspeakable vice that deforms minds by disfiguring 
ideas so that they make a man say what he never 
said and to represent what he never was. This malig- 
nant vice is not above the village gossip and the vile 
tongue of common slander, but it has been especially 
the method of gamblers in the most sacred social in- 
terests, and of demagogues trying to control the elec- 
tion of officers and legislators for our government. 

Such perversions were placed on Lincoln's mean- 



144. THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

ing throughout the South that his name was the most 
abhorred of all names, until the miseries of recon- 
struction, by contrast, so brought in comparisons 
that he became known as the one great soul who had 
not, through all the terrible struggle, ever uttered a 
single bitter word against them, and who was the 
one great friend who could have given them justice 
and peace. 

Soon the typical view of the intelligent South was 
that ''his untimely and tragic end was one of the 
severest catastrophes of the war," and, to the South, 
his death was "the direst misfortune that ever dark- 
ened the calendar of its woes." 

Up to the time of his nomination and following 
him in many ways on to his death, the Eastern States 
took up the most trivial news items and used them 
for ridicule, as representing Lincoln to be the mere 
caricature of a man. 

One of these minor incidents, showing this defam- 
ing method, is represented as follows in the news- 
paper headlines of New York and New England. 
The great news, in the midst of the fearful times, 
relating to this incident was usually introduced in 
these words, "Old Abe kisses a Pretty Girl." 

Here is the true story : A little girl named Grace 
Bedell lived at Westfield, New York. Her father 
was a republican, but her two brothers were demo- 



TO MISREPRESENT NOT FBEEDOM 145 

crats, and, therefore, hearing much excited argu- 
ment, she was greatly interested. Of course, she was 
a republican and she wanted to help her father. See- 
ing a portrait of Lincoln gave her an idea. If Lin- 
coln only had whiskers like her father, he would look 
better, and so her brothers might not be so much 
against him. No sooner was this improvement 
thought of than she hastened to put it into an earn- 
est letter to Mr. Lincoln, telling him of her idea. 

She seemed to think that all great men, like her 
father, must have a little girl, so she said in closing, 
**If you have no time to answer my letter, will you 
allow your little girl to reply for you?" 

Such a letter could not be ignored by the great- 
hearted man to whom it came. He replied, 

''Springfield, Illinois, Oct. 19, 1860. 
''My dear little Miss: 

"Your very agreeable letter of the fifteenth is re- 
ceived. I regret the necessity of saying I have no 
daughter. I have three sons; one seventeen; one 
nine, and one seven years of age. They, with their 
mother, constitute my whole family. As to whiskers, 
having never worn any, do you think people would 
call it a piece of silly affectation if I should begin 
now? "Your very sincere well-wisher, 

"A. Lincoln." 



146 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

It happened, when on the journey to "Washington 
to be inaugurated, that the train stopped at West- 
field. Suddenly, in speaking to the people, he re- 
membered. 

**I have a little correspondent at this place," he 
said, ''I would like to see her." 

Some one called out and asked if Grace Bedell 
was in the crowd that surged around the train. Far 
back in the crowd the way began to open and a 
beautiful little girl came forward, timid but happy, 
to speak to the President-elect, who was also happy 
to show her that he had taken her advice and begun 
to grow a beard. The little girl was lifted up to him. 
He took her in his arms and tenderly kissed her fore- 
head in the midst of the enthusiastic approval of a 
cheering multitude. 

But the story ran the rounds of the East as the 
uncouth conduct of a backwoods demagogue. 

As Europe got its idea of the new President from 
the New York and New England papers, he was be- 
lieved by foreign leaders to be the proof of degene- 
rate democracy and the failure of popular govern- 
ment. Throughout the war there was lavished upon 
him an unceasing tirade of caricature and lampoon. 
But they had been deceived. The shock of his assas- 
sination seemed to tear off the veil that blinded their 
eyes, and since then all the scholarship of Europe 




]/mc()lii Stnliic — Cliit-aiio. lllinuU 



no 31 ELY WAYS 147 

has analyzed his career as showing one of the great 
characters of the world. History finds that he was 
a projihet of ideal humanity, the farthest possible 
from despotic sovereignties. Dynastic states can 
never fight for a democratic government merely to 
preserve it, and democracies can never fight merely 
to preserve a party in power. It may very well be 
doubted that the North could have w^on the Civil 
War if there had not been involved the moral issues 
of human slavery. England would surely have in- 
tervened for the starving workers of their cotton- 
mills, but the workers refused to have their cause 
supported by fastening slavery upon any part of the 
human race. 



ni. HOMELY WAYS TO EXPRESS TRUTH 

The way Lincoln looked at the malicious denun- 
ciations of his conduct of the war, the vile stories 
told about him and the wicked perversions of the 
things he said was once characterized by him in the 
story of an incident that happened to two Irish emi- 
grants who had come out into the wilderness fresh 
from the Emerald Isle. 

They were tramping their way through the West 



148 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

seeking for work. One evening they camped at the 
edge of a pond of water. Being tired, they were 
soon fast asleep. Suddenly they were awakened by 
a chorus of bellowing sounds the like of which they 
had never heard before. It was not comparable to 
anything they knew of man or beasts. Baum, gur- 
gle and bellow it went here, there, and then seem- 
ingly everywhere. They grabbed their walking-stick 
shillelahs, ready to face the enemy, whether man, 
beast or devil. But nothing was to be seen. They 
crept forward, then boldly searched, strained their 
eyes in every direction and defied their enemy with 
many insulting challenges to show himself, but the 
scattering bellowing was all that could be found. 

At last a happy thought struck one of them. ''Ja- 
mie," he cried to his companion, ''I know what it is I 
It's nothing but a noise." 

Lincoln took this attitude toward all minor things 
that could have absorbed his time for weightier ques- 
tions. 

When General Phelps captured Ship Island, near 
New Orleans, early in the war, he took upon himself 
the power of freeing all the slaves on the island. 
This looked like something very important to many 
people, who were surprised that Lincoln took no no- 
tice of it. At last he was taken to task for it, and 
he settled the whole question with a story. 



HOMELY WAYS 149 

There was once a man who was very meek but he 
had a very aggressive wife. He had the reputation 
of being badly henpecked. One day a friend saw 
the poor man's wife switching him out of the house. 

The first time the friend met the henpecked man, 
after that disgraceful episode, the friend said, *'I 
have always stood up for you, as you well know, but 
now I am done with you. Any man who allows his 
wife to switch him out of the house deserves all he 
gets." 

The abused man patted his friend on the back and 
in a conciliating tone said, *'Now don't feel that way 
about it, it didn't hurt me a bit, and you have no idea 
what a great amount of satisfaction it gives my dear 
wife." 

Lincoln saw things as symbols with moral mean- 
ings. On seeing a tree covered with a luxuriant vine, 
he said, *'The vine is beautiful, but, like certain 
habits of men, it decorates the ruin it makes." 

Speaking of the difference in meaning between 
character and reputation, he said, "Character is like 
a tree and reputation is like its shadow. The shadow 
is what we think of it, but the real thing is the tree." 

Some influential people were urging him to declare 
the slaves free before conditions made such a thing 
practical. He pressed that point home to them with 
a question. 



150 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

^'IIow many legs," he asked, ''will a sheep have if 
you call the sheep's tail a leg?" 

They promptly answered five. 

"You are wrong," he replied, "for calling a 
sheep's tail a leg won't make it so." 

To importunate and impetuous persons Lincoln al- 
ways had the right reply. Once a rather proud 
mother came before him with a rather haughty-look- 
ing son. 

"Mr. President," she said very conclusively, "you 
must give a Colonel's commission to my son." 

He waited for her to explain why he must do so. 

"Sir," she exclaimed, "I have a right to demand 
it. My grandfather fought at Lexington ; my uncle 
stood his ground at Blandensburg ; my father fought 
at New Orleans ; and my husband was killed at Mon- 
terey." 

"I guess. Madam," Lincoln promptly replied, 
"that your family has done its share for its coun- 
try. Let's give others a chance." 



IV. THE GREAT TRAGEDY 



Our story here has to do only with episodes that 
compose the personal interest of Lincoln and does 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 15 1 

not take into consideration the usual public or po- 
litical affairs that build up his historical character 
and national service. But the tragedy of his mar- 
tyrdom has many important points of interest relat- 
ing to the interpretation of his personal life. The 
Book of Fate opens only upon the past and we call 
it history, but it is the ^' light of experience" for so- 
cial reason and the moral law. 

On the evening of April 14, 1865, a happy party 
of distinguished friends were gathered for dinner 
with President Lincoln at the White House. Mrs. 
Lincoln, being the manager of social affairs, made 
up a theatre party to see Laura Keene play "Our 
American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre. In the party 
were General Grant and his wife, and Governor 
Oglesby of Illinois. The box for the party having 
been procured in the morning, the manager of the 
theatre announced in the afternoon papers that the 
President and the Hero of Appomattox would be 
present at the farewell benefit performance of Miss 
Keene. 

The house was filled, but the President came late, 
as Mr. and Mrs. Grant had decided to take the train 
that evening for the West, and Mrs. Lincoln had to 
rearrange the plans for her party, so as to include 
Major Rathburn and his stepsister. Miss Harris, 
daughter of Senator Harris of New York. The 



152 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

President desired to give up going, but, on being 
told how disappointed the public would be, he yielded 
to the persuasion and went. 

They arrived about the middle of the first act and 
were received with loud applause, the people stand- 
ing as the band played ''Hail to the Chief." 

One can hardly refrain from pausing, as this scene 
comes before the mind, to wonder if the log-cabin 
boy had beheld this scene in a prophetic dream how 
extravagant and impossible it would have seemed. 

On reaching the box, the President took a large 
arm-chair in front, with Mrs. Lincoln by his side 
on the right. 

After they were seated, the interrupted play was 
resumed. 

It was about the middle of the third act, the time 
10.20, when the audience was startled by a shot, and 
immediately the shout, *'Sic semper tyi^annis'^ (so 
ever to tyrants). Next came the piercing shriek of 
Mrs. Lincoln, then a well-known actor, John Wilkes 
Booth, was seen to swing out over the box and fall 
heavily upon the stage. 

The horrified people arose with cries of alarm and 
all was confusion, so that witnesses from the audi- 
ence could see no more, and they poured forth into 
the streets with the dreadful news that the President 
had been shot. 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 153 

Booth had desired to make the assassination as 
spectacular and sensational as possible. He pre- 
pared himself, just before the terrible deed, with a 
heavy drink of whisky in the nearby saloon. Going 
into the theatre from the front, he passed along the 
wall to the passageway leading to the box. He took 
out a visiting card and went up to the President's 
messenger, who was sitting just outside. Presenting 
the card, he passed through the door into the aisle 
back of the box, closing and barring the door after 
him. Slipping in just behind the President, he aimed 
the pistol at the back of his victim's head and fired 
the shot. 

Some testify that his first words were *' Revenge 
for the South.'' 

As the assassin swung himself over to take the 
twelve-foot leap to the stage. Major Rathburn of 
the party tried to catch him, and so received a severe 
wound on the hand from a dagger. An American 
flag draped the front of the stage, and in this Booth's 
spur caught, throwing him so as to fracture his left 
leg, and which actually resulted in being the cause 
of his capture. This flag has thus been called the 
*'mute avenger of its Nation's Chief." 

Excited crowds were nothing new in Washington, 
but witnesses declare they never saw such insane 
despair as that with which the people expressed their 



154 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

grief. Shouting, frenzied men and women ran aim- 
lessly here and there in a chaos of ungovernable 
disorder. 

People could hardly believe that the hideous deed 
had been done by John Wilkes Booth, whose rising 
fame as a tragedian was only surpassed by his fa- 
mous brother and father. But he had been recog- 
nized by Laura Keene, as with quick thought she 
grasped a glass of water and ran to the President's 
box. She seemed to be almost the first to under- 
stand, and to reach the martyr's side with help for 
him. She held his head in her lap while the doctors 
were examining the wound. Her silk dress stained 
with his blood is still kept with the sacred relics at 
his tomb in Springfield, Illinois. 

The picture of that box party cannot be surpassed 
by anything ever set up in the romantic imagination. 
At the death-moment it contained five persons. One 
of them was the greatest man of his time, just emerg- 
ing as victor in one of the most consequential strug- 
gles of all human history. The death blow was upon 
him from a type of man as utterly his opposite in 
everything making the form of man that anyone can 
conceive. He was of the most illustrious family of 
actors in his time, handsome, a fashionable beau, and 
a moral degenerate, — the most courted idler of the 
social show. For his deed he was destined in a few 



THE GEE AT TRAGEDY 155 

weeks to die the death of a beaten dog in a filthy 
stable. But no less in direful tragedy was the fate 
of the betrothed lovers, Major Rathburn and his 
stepsister, Miss Harris, who were the guests in that 
ghastly social hour. A few months later the young 
man went insane, killed his sweetheart and died in a 
madhouse. 

Lincoln was still alive but unconscious when re- 
sponsible persons, in a few minutes, came into con- 
trol. He was carried across the street to the nearest 
room where he could be made as comfortable as pos- 
sible. The doctors had no hope that he would ever 
return to consciousness. The surgeons and the near- 
est official friends were all that were allowed to re- 
main in the little room with him. The pale light of 
a single gas jet flickered down over him. Secretary 
Stanton stood against the wall wiiting telegrams 
that told how the battle was going, and giving orders 
needed to keep the peace of that dark hour. At seven- 
twenty-two the next morning Lincoln's heart ceased 
to beat and one of the greatest characters of history 
had passed from life. 

Mr. Stanton closed the martyr's eyes, drew the 
sheet over his face, and said, *'Now he belongs to the 
Ages." 



CHAPTER X 

I. THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY 

The nation was in mourning at the unspeakable 
tragedy. Friend and foe had just begun to learn 
how great was the difference between him and other 
men. Coming as it did at the close of the war, in 
the very dawn of peace, the assassination seemed so 
needless and cruel, even in the name of his bitterest 
foe. 

Walt Whitman wrote one of the most stirring ap- 
preciations of the time. 

* * O Captain ! My Captain I Our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we 

sought is won. 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all ex- 
ulting. 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim 
and daring. 

156 



THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY 157 

''But heart! heart I heart! 
O the bleeding drops of red, 
"VA^ere on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen, cold and dead. 

*'0 Captain! My Captain! Rise up and hear the 

bells ; 
Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle 

trills. 
For you the bouquets and ribboned wreaths, for 

you the shores a-crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager 

faces turning; 

''Here, Captain! dear father! 
This arm beneath your head! 
It is some dream that on the deck 
You've fallen cold and dead. 

*'My Captain does not answer me, his lips are pale 
and still. 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor 

' vAW, 
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage 

closed and done. 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with 
object won. 



158 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

''Exult, shores, and ring, O bells I 
But I with mournful tread, 
Walk the deck, my Captain lies, 
Fallen, cold and dead." 

William Cullen Bryant wrote the ode for the fune- 
ral services held in New York City. Two of the stan- 
zas are as follows: 

''In sorrow by thy bier we stand, 
Amid the awe that husheth all, 
And speak the anguish of a land 
That shook with horror at thy fall. 

"Pure was thy life; its bloody close 
Has placed thee with the Sons of Light, 
Among the noble hearts of those 
Who perished in the cause of Right." 

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote for the funeral ser- 
vices at Concord, Massachusetts, a poem of which the 
following is the last stanza : 

"Great captains, with their guns and drums. 
Disturb our judgment for the hour. 
But at last, silence comes; 
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, 



THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY 159 

Our children shall behold his fame, 
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American.'^ 



II. THE TIME WHEN *' THOSE WHO CAME TO SCOFF RE- 
MAINED TO pray" 

Lincoln ^s death was received throughout the 
South generally as the death of an enemy. Well do 
they know now that it could have been said of them 
then, ''Father forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." 

The sorrow throughout the North was as in the 
midst of Egypt's ancient woe. It was as if "There 
was not a house where there was not one dead. ' ' 

As was once said of a great martyr of liberty, slain 
three centuries before, so it could be said of Lin- 
coln, "He went through life bearing the load of a 
people's sorrows upon his shoulders with a smiling 
face. While he lived he was the guiding star of a 
whole brave nation, and when he died the little chil- 
dren cried in the streets." 

Periodicals that had ridiculed him from his first 
appearance in their view, and that had caused many 



160 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

of their readers to believe him little better than a 
clown in the arena of affairs, or than a court fool 
before the nations, dropped their defaming carica- 
tures of him, and gave him nearer justice. 

One of the most belittling and besmirching peri- 
odicals of England against Lincoln was the "London 
Punch." The war-president of the United States 
was, largely from this source of authority, the jest 
of all Europe. 

But the issue following the assassination of Lin- 
coln contained a great picture. It was s\Tnbolical 
of England laying a WT.'eath of flowers upon Lincoln's 
coffin. The picture was dra^vn by Tenniel and with 
it was a most penitent poem by Tom Taylor, who was 
author of the play, '^Our American Cousin," which 
Lincoln was attending when assassinated. Five of 
the expressive stanzas are as follows : 

"So he grew up, a destined work to do, 
And lived to do it ; four long suffering years, 

Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report lived through, 
And then he heard the hisses changed to cheers; 

"The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise. 
And took both with the same unwavering mood: 

Till, as he came to light, from darkling days. 
And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood. 



''THOSE WHO CAME TO SCOFF'' 161 

"A felon hand, between the goal and him, 
Reached from behind his back, a trigger pressed, — 

And those perplexed and patient eyes grew dim. 
Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest I 

''Beside this corpse, that bears for winding sheet 
The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, 

Between the mourners at his head and feet, 
Say, scurril jester, is there room for you'? 

''Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, 
To lame my pencil and confute my pen ; 

To make me own this hind of princes peer, 
This rail-splitter, a true-born king of men.'* 

In 1879, at an unveiling in Boston of Freedman's 
Memorial Statue, a duplicate of the original in Lin- 
coln Square, Washington, a poem was read from 
Whittier, of which the last three stanzas are the 
most significant in their characterization. It beau- 
tifully expresses the faith that in righteousness is 
personal power, even as it also "exalteth a nation." 

"We rest in peace where these sad eyes 

Saw^ peril, strife and pain; 
His was the nation's sacrifice, 

And ours the priceless gain. 



162 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

"0, symbol of God's will on earth 

As it is done above ! 
Bear witness to the cost and worth 

Of justice and of love. 

*' Stand in thy place and testify 

To coming ages long, 
That truth is stronger than a lie, 

And righteousness than wrong/' 



III. SOME TYPICAL EXAMPLES GIVING VIEWS OF LIN- 
COLN'S LIFE 

Vachel Lindsay invokes the spirit of American 
patriotism when he says, 

''Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all, 
That which is gendered in the wilderness, 
From lonely prairies and God's tenderness. 
Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream. 
Born w^here the ghosts of buffaloes still dream. 
Whose spirit hoof -beats storm above his grave, 
About that breast of earth and prairie-fire — 
Fire that freed the slave." 



SOME TYPICAL EXAMPLES 163 

Herr Loewes in the Prussian Parliament said: 
*'Mr. Lincoln performed his duties without pomp or 
ceremony, and relied on that dignity of the inner 
self alone, which is far above rank, orders and titles. 
He was a faithful servant, not less of his own coun- 
try than of civilization, freedom and humanity. ' ' 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing of Lincoln's 
death, said: 

**Dear Lord, with pitying eye behold, 
This martyr generation, 
Which Thou, through trials manifold. 
Art showing Thy salvation I 
O let the blood by murder spilt 
Wash out Thy stricken children's guilt. 
And sanctify our nation!" 

Samuel Francis Smith, author of the national 
hymn, ^ ^America," in a long poetic tribute wrote : 

*' Grandly he loved and lived; 
Not his own age alone 

Bears the proud impress of his sovereign mind. 
Down the long march of history, 
Ages and men shall see 
What one great soul can be 



164 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

What one great soul can do 
To make a nation true. ' ' 

Horace Fiske closed a poem inspired by the Saint 
Gauden's statue, as follows: 

*'In human strength he towers almost divine, 
His mighty shoulders bent with breaking care, 

His thought- worn face with sympathies grown fine : 
And as men gaze, their hearts as oft declare 

That this is he whom all their hearts enshrine 

This man that saved a race from slow despair." 

Theodore Roosevelt said, in an address on the 
character of Lincoln, "One of his most wonderful 
characteristics was the extraordinary way in which 
he could fight valiantly against what he deemed 
WTong, and yet preserve undiminished his love and 
respect for the brother from whom he differed. ' ' 

Woodrow Wilson said, *' There was no point at 
which life touched him that he did not speak back 
to it instantly its meaning. ' ' 

Sir Spencer Walpole saj^s in his history, "Of all 
men born to the Anglo-Saxon race in the nineteenth 
century, Abraham Lincoln deserves the highest place 
in history. '^ 



ENT) OF A TJUNDUET) YEARS 165 

IV. REMEMBRANCE AT THE END OF A HUNDRED YEARS 

The centennial anniversary of Lincoln's birth 
called forth expressions of ai)preciation from over 
all the world. His memory and his meaning had not 
grown dim in the interests of humanity. A few typi- 
cal examples illustrate the love and reverence in- 
spired by his great work in the human cause. 

James Oppenheim, in his poem in praise of the 
Lincoln child, says, 

*'0h, to pour our love through deeds 

To be as Lincoln was 1 

That all the land might fill its daily needs 

Glorified by a human cause I 

Then were America a vast World-Torch 

Flaming a faith across the dying earth. 

Proclaiming from the Atlantic's rocky porch 

That a New World was struggling at the Birth I'' 

James Whitcomb Riley, Avriting of Lincoln, the 
boy, says in the last stanza : 

**0r thus we know, nor doubt it not, 

The boy he must have been 
Whose budding heart bloomed with the thought 

All men are kith and kin 

With love-light in his eyes and shade 

Of prescient tears : Because 



166 THE STOUY OF LINCOLN 

Only of such a boy were made 
The loving man he was." 

Ambassador Bryce of England, speaking at Lin- 
coln 's tomb before a vast gathering at the centennial 
anniversary of Lincoln's birth, said, ''To us in Eng- 
land, Lincoln is one of the heroes of the race from 
whence we sprung. Great men are the noblest pos- 
session of a Nation, and are potent forces in the 
moulding of national character. Their influence 
lives after them, and, if they be good as well as great, 
they remain as beacons lighting the course of all who 
follow them. They set for succeeding generations 
the standards of public life. They stir the spirit and 
rouse the energy of the youth who seek to emulate 
their virtues in the service of their country. ' ' 

Vice-President Fairbanks in an address at Harris- 
burg on that occasion said, ''His life was spent in 
conflict. In his youth, he struggled with nature. At 
the bar of justice he contended for the rights of his 
clients. In the wider field of politics, he fought with 
uncommon power to overthrow the wrong and en- 
throne the right. He fought not for the love of con- 
quest, but for the love of truth. By nature he was 
a man of peace. He instinctively loved justice, right, 
and liberty. His conscience impelled him to uphold 
the right whenever it was denied his fellowman." 

S. E. Kiser ended a centennial poem with the fol- 
lowing stanza : 



END OF A HUNDRED YEARS 167 

^'Lo, where the feet of Lincohi passed, the earth 
Is sacred. Where he knelt we set a shrine ! 
Oh, to have pressed his hand I That had sufficed 

To make my children wonder at my w^orth 

Yet, let them glory, since their land and mine 
Hath reared the greatest martyr after Christ ! ' ' 

Virginia Boyle, in her poem for the Philadelphia 
Brigade Association, said in two of her stanzas : 

' ' No trumpet blared the w^ord that he was born, 
No lightning flashed its symbols on that day : 
And only Poverty and Fate pressed on, 
To serve as handmaids where he lowly layf 

^'And up from Earth and toil, he slowly w^on, 

Pressed by a bitterness he proudly spurned, 
Till by grim courage, born from sun to sun. 
He turned defeat, as victory is turned. ' ' 

Edwin Markham concluded a centennial poem as 
follows : 

*'He held his place 



Held the long purpose like a growing tree 

Held on through blame and faltered not at praise, 
And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down 
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs. 
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, 
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky." 



CHAPTER XI 
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS 



I. THE HARMONIZING CONTRAST OF MEN 

American freedom and democratic humanity re- 
quire American minds to be composed of free-made 
ideas, organized efficiently for the righteous pro- 
motion of ^'life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
ness," if we are ever to be safe in the faith that "gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, and for the peo- 
ple shall not perish from the earth." 

The American order, however defective, even as it 
is composed of defective minds, is the only safety for 
a free humanity. The Western hemisphere is under 
the control of that democratic order, and America is 
large enough and powerful enough to stand alone, in 
clear vision and unadulterated theory, for the rights 
of man. America alone is clear-minded enough for 
the unprejudiced and unbiased championship of a 
free-minded world. 

168 



THE HAEMONIZING CONTRAST 169 

Washington and Lincoln reached the heights from 
which they saw together one vision of the Promised 
Land, ''ordained from the foundations of the world'' 
for the chosen order of human evolution. They 
wanted no "entangling alliances" with a foreign or- 
der, or a fragmentary system of human freedom. 
Americans have so far kept the peace with the un- 
compromised moral law of the ''free and equal" 
rights of man. America is dedicated to the proposi- 
tion that a compromised order of freedom and 
equality, either through treaty or war, shall never 
invade the Western Hemisphere. 

American youth, and every newcomer entitled to 
home or refuge on American soil, must know the 
truth that makes men free. That truth is marvel- 
lously embodied in the lives of Washington and Lin- 
coln. Their careers and patriotism have been con- 
trasted and unified by many learned students of their 
meaning for America. The characterization of their 
lives, as significant for Americans, and needing much 
to be well understood, has been nobly done by Charles 
Sumner. The more important part of that impres- 
sive valuation is as follows: 

"The work left undone by Washington was con- 
tinued by Lincoln. Kindred in service, kindred in 
patriotism, each was naturally surrounded at death 



170 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

by kindred homage. One sleeps in the East, the other 
sleeps in the West ; and thus, in death, as in life, one 
is the complement of the other. 

"Each was at the head of the republic during a 
period of surpassing trial ; and each thought only of 
the public good, simply, purely, constantly, so that 
single-hearted devotion to country will always find a 
synon3'm in their names. Each was the national 
chief during a time of successful war. Each was 
the representative of his country at a great epoch 
of history. 

''Unlike in origin, conversation, and character, 
they were unlike, also, in the ideas which they served, 
except so far as each was the servant of his coun- 
try. The war conducted by Washington was unlike 
the war conducted by Lincoln, — as the peace which 
crowned the arms of the one was unlike the peace 
which began to smile upon the other. The two wars 
did not differ in the scale of operations, and in the 
tramp of mustered hosts, more than in the ideas in- 
volved. The first was for national independence ; the 
second was to make the republic one and indivisible, 
on the indestructible foundations of liberty and 
equality. In the relation of cause and effect, the 
first was the natural precursor and herald of the 
second. By the sword of Washington independence 
was secured; but the unity of the republic and the 




l-hiiaiH-ii-alioii Stnluc of l/nic(.lii- AViisliiii.uioii. I). ( '. 



THE HABMONIZING CONTRAST 171 

principles of the Declaration were left exposed to 
question. From that day to this, through various 
chances, they have been questioned, and openly as- 
sailed, — until at last the republic was constrained to 
take up arms in their defence. 

**Such are these two great wars in which these two 
chiefs bore such part. Washington fought for na- 
tional independence and triumphed, making his 
country an example to mankind. Lincoln drew a re- 
luctant sword to save those great ideas, essential to 
the life and character of the republic. * * * 
*' Rejoice as you point to this child of the people, 
who was lifted so high that republican institutions 
became manifest in him i * * * Above all, see to 
it that his constant vows are fulfilled, and that the 
promises of the fathers are maintained, so that no 
person in the upright form of man can be shut out 
from their protection. Then will the unity of the 
republic be fixed on a foundation that cannot fail, 
and other nations will enjoy its security. The cor- 
ner-stone of national independence is already in its 
place, and on it is inscribed the name of George 
Washington. There is another stone which must 
have its place at the corner also. This is the Decla- 
ration of Independence, with all its promises ful- 
filled. On this stone we will gratefully inscribe the 
name of Abraham Lincoln." 



172 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

Caiiyle says that ''sincerity, a deep, great, gen- 
uine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in 
any way heroic. All great men have this as the pri- 
mary material in them." This is why the so-called 
"art for art's sake" never can be great. It is sin- 
cerity for merely formal success, and not for the 
spirit of "life more abundantly." Formal efficiency 
is achieved only in the complicated training of an 
extended education, but social efficiency of immeas- 
urably greater value is the simplicity of knowledge. 
It is the source and explanation of all interests, and 
in that learning, Lincoln had no superior. He never 
achieved any good that he did not at once want to 
share it with others. As a boy he never learned any- 
thing good that he did not want to express it to oth- 
ers. In this process of receiving and giving is the 
fundamental means of building character and mind. 
In teaching others, he taught himself, and thus in 
losing his life he found it. In being able to tell his 
observations and interpretations to his comrades, he 
was training to be the schoolmaster of the world. 

Lincoln's earnest sincerity relating to himself, his 
associates, his community, his country, and for all 
mankind, may be illustrated in a few quotations : 

"The man who will not investigate both sides of a 
question is dishonest." 

"After all, the one meaning of life is simply to be 
kind.'^ 



THE HARMONIZING CONTRAST 173 

'*! have not done much, but this I have done — 
wherever I have found a thistle growing, I have tried 
to pluck it up, and in its place to plant a flower." 

''I have been too familiar ^\'ith disappointment, to 
be very much chagrined by defeat." 

''Without the assistance of that Divine Being I 
cannot succeed, and with that assistance I cannot 
fail." 

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be 
its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we 
must live through all time, or die by suicide." 

"A majority held in restraint by constitutional 
checks and limitations, and always changing easily 
with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sen- 
timents, is the only true sovereign of a free people." 

"Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer. 
The hired laborer of yesterday may labor on his own 
account today, and hire others to labor for him to- 
morrow. Advancement and improvement in condi- 
tions is the order of things in a society of equals, — in 
a democracy." 

In a speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859, 
he said, "I believe there is a genuine popular sover- 
eignty. I think a definition of genuine popular sov- 
ereignty, in the abstract, would be about this : That 
each man shall do precisely as he pleases with him- 
self, and with all those things which exclusively con- 
cern him. Applied to government this principle 



174 THE STOBY OF LINCOLN 

would be, that a general government shall do all 
those things which pertain to it, and all the local gov- 
ernments shall do precisely as they please in respect 
to those matters which exclusively concern them. I 
understand that this government of the United 
States, under which we live, is based upon that prin- 
ciple ; and I am misunderstood if it is supposed that 
I have any war to make upon that principle. ' ' 

But, there is a patriotic masterpiece of Lincoln's 
thought, which, with the reinforcement of occasion 
and place, such as the field of Gettysburg was, con- 
tains all the unmeasurable and priceless meaning of 
Lincoln for American patriotism and the manhood 
of America. It is his address of dedication on the 
battlefield of Gettysburg. In effect on the human 
mind, it probably can never be surpassed as a mes- 
sage of political freedom for the rights of man. 



II. A MASTERPIECE OF MEANING FOR AMERICA 

The battle of Gettysburg is regarded by historians 
as one of the decisive battles of the world. It was 
fought July 2, 3 and 4, 1863. On the first anniver- 
sary, a great national meeting was held there to dedi- 
cate the ground as a government burial place for the 
soldiers who had died there. 



A MASTERPIECE OF MEANING 175 

Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, on the eve of the 
dedication, in the course of an address, said, ' ' I thank 
my God for the hope that this is the last fratricidal 
war which will fall upon this country, vouchsafed us 
from heaven, as the richest, the broadest, the most 
beautiful and capable of a great destiny, that has 
ever been given to any part of the human race." 

At the opening of the ceremonies, before a vast 
concourse of people, from all the Northern states, 
convened on the open battlefield. Rev. T. H. Stockton 
said in the course of his dedicatory prayer, *'In be- 
half of all humanity, whose ideal is divine, whose first 
memory is Thine image lost, and whose last hope is 
Thine image restored, and especially of our own na- 
tion, whose history has been so favored, whose posi- 
tion is so peerless, whose mission is so sublime, and 
whose future so attractive, we thank Thee for the 
unspeakable patience of Thy compassion, and the ex- 
ceeding greatness of Thy loving kindness. . . . By 
this Altar of Sacrifice, on this Field of Deliverance, 
on this Mount of Salvation, within the fiery and 
bloody line of these ^munitions of rocks, ^ looking back 
to the dark days of fear and trembling, and to the 
rapture of relief that came after, we multiply our 
thanksgivings and confess our obligations. . . . Our 
enemies . . . prepared to cast the chain of Slavery 
around the form of Freedom, binding life and death 
together forever. . . . But, behind these hills was 



176 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

heard the feeble march of a smaller, but still pursuing 
host. Onward they hurried, day and night, for God 
and their country. Footsore, wayworn, hungry, 
thirsty, faint, — but not in heart, — they came to dare 
all, to bear all, and to do all that is possible to he- 
roes. . . . Baffled, bruised, broken, their enemies re- 
coiled, retired and disappeared. . . . But oh, the 
slain! . . . From the Coasts beneath the Eastern 
Star, from the shores of Northern lakes and rivers, 
from the flowers of Western prairies, and from the 
homes of the Midway and Border, they came here to 
die for us and for mankind. ... As the trees are not 
dead, though their foliage is gone, so our heroes are 
not dead, though their forms have fallen. . . . The 
spirit of their example is here. And, so long as time 
lasts, the pilgrims of our own land, and from all 
lands, will thrill with its inspiration." 

Edward Everett, as the orator of the day, said in 
the course of his scholarly address, **As my eye 
ranges over the fields whose sod was so recently 
moistened by the blood of gallant and loyal men, I 
feel, as never before, how truly it was said of old, *it 
is sweet and becoming to die for one's country.' I 
feel, as never before, how justly from the dawn of his- 
tory to the present time, men have paid the homage 
of their gratitude and admiration to the memory of 
those who nobly sacrificed their lives, that their fel- 
lowmen may live in safety and honor. ... I do not 



A MASTERPIECE OF MEANING 177 

believe there is in all history, the record of a Civil 
War of such gigantic dimensions where so little has 
been done in the spirit of vindictiveness as in this 
war. . . . There is no bitterness in the hearts of the 
masses. . . . The bonds that unite us as one Peo- 
ple, — a substantial community of origin, language, 
belief and law ; common, national and political inter- 
ests . . . these bonds of union are of perennial force 
and energy, while the causes of alienation are imag- 
inary, factitious and transient. The heart of the Peo- 
ple, North and South, is for the Union. . . . The 
weary masses of the people are yearning to see the 
dear old flag floating over their capitols, and they 
sigh for the return of peace, prosperity and happi- 
ness, which they enjoyed under a government whose 
power was felt only in its blessings. . . . You feel, 
though the occasion is mournful, that it is good to be 
here ! God bless the Union ! It is dearer to us for the 
blood of brave men which has been shed in its de- 
fense. . . . 'The whole earth,' said Pericles, as he 
stood over the remains of his fellow citizens, who had 
fallen in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, 
'the whole earth is the sepulchre of illustrious men.' 
All time, he might have added, is the millenium of 
their glory." 

The place and the occasion were supremely inspir- 
ing to patriotism, not only for the triumph of moral 
principle in one's country, but for its meaning to all 



178 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

humanity. The great battlefield spread out before 
the eyes of the vast concourse gathered there from all 
the states, and the spirit of the heroic scenes animated 
ever}^ mind. 

Edward Everett, then regarded as the greatest 
orator in America, had delivered the dedicatory ora- 
tion through a long strain of attention, during the 
weary and fatiguing hours. The President was then 
called on to close the dedication with whatever he 
might feel desirable to say. He did so in a few words, 
but these few words are cherished as among the great- 
est contributions to the meaning of civilization. To 
one of the decisive battles for freedom in the world, 
it gave a starry crown from ^Hhe voice of the people" 
as **the voice of God." 

The War Department appropriated five thousand 
dollars to cast this speech in bronze and set it up on 
the battlefield of Gettysburg. It is regarded as a 
masterpiece of dedication in the literature of the 
world. 

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers 
brought forth on this continent a new nation, con- 
ceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition 
that all men are created equal. 

**Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing 
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and 
so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a 



A MASTERPIECE OF MEANING 179 

great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedi- 
cate a portion of that field as a final resting place 
for those who here gave their lives that that nation 
might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that 
we should do this. 

"But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we 
cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. 
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, 
have consecrated it far above our poor power to 
add or detract. The world will little note, nor long 
remember, what we say here, but it can never forget 
what they did here. 

**It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated 
here to the unfinished work which they who fought 
here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather 
for us to be here dedicated to the great task remain- 
ing before us : that from the same honored dead we 
take increased devotion to that cause for which they 
gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here 
highly resolve that these dead should not have died 
in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a 
new birth of freedom, and that government of the 
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish 
from the earth." 



180 TEE STORY OF LINCOLN 



III. THE MISSION" OF AMERICA 

The understanding person who becomes conscious 
of a meaning for his life, realizes a most important 
responsibility to work for the betterment of his mind 
and the material conditions that are to become as 
his future self. The moral person, who becomes con- 
scious of a meaning for human life, works for this 
betterment as his contribution to the progress of pos- 
terity. This means that a moral individual coin- 
cides mth a social humanity. Anything not thus har- 
monizing morally for the world as it is, in order to 
promote a world as it ought to be, is an enemy of both 
self and society. 

Lincoln admonishes us to remember that **The 
struggle of today is not altogether for today, — it is 
for a vast future also." We learned rapidly, when 
the true situation came into our view, that, as Pro- 
fessor Phelps voiced it long ago, *'To save America 
we must save the world." American patriotism is 
clearly world-patriotism, and it has become synony- 
mous with humanity. This old truth was discovered 
by the Revolutionary Fathers, and it is the mission 
of America to make it the truth of the World. 

The International Teachers' Congress represent- 
ing eighteen nations, which met at Liege in 1905, 
adopted five definite ideas of International Peace, 



THE MISSION OF AMEBIC A 181 

that should be promoted through all available ways, 
in all the schools of civilized nations. Briefly stated, 
those fundamental ideas were as follows : 

1. The morality of individuals is the same for 
people and nations. 

2. The ideal of brotherly love has no limit. 

3. All life must be duly respected. 

4. Human rights are the same for one and all. 

5. Love of country coincides with love of human- 
ity. 

Such principles and such a definition of patriotism 
were upheld by the makers and preservers of Amer- 
ica, at the greatest cost of treasure and life, and they 
are the life-interest of every one worthy of the name 
American. It moved Bishop J. P. Ne^vman to say 
of Lincoln in his anniversary oration of 1894, ** Lin- 
coln's mission was as large as his country, vast as 
humanity, enduring as time. No greater thought can 
ever enter the human mind than obedience to law and 
freedom for all. . . . Time has vindicated the char- 
acter of his statesmanship, that to preserve the Union 
was to save this great nation for human liberty.'' 

American faith has at last come to the conditions 
when it can realize itself in fulfilling the moral work 
of the world. That vision came into full view during 
the Great European War. 



182 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

President Wilson, in his address to Congress, April 
2, 1917, said: 

''We are at the beginning of an age in which it will 
be insisted that the same standards of conduct and 
of responsibility for wrong shall be observed among 
nations and their Governments that are observed 
among the individual citizens of civilized states." 

Congress acted upon this reaffirmation of the re- 
sponsibility of Americans and the mission of Amer- 
ica. Concerning the monstrous invasion of humanity 
and ruthless denial of international law, he said : 

''Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where 
the peace of the world is involved and the freedom 
of its peoples and the menace to that peace and free- 
dom lies in the existence of autocratic Governments 
backed by organized force which is controlled wholly 
by their will, not by the will of their people. We have 
seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances." 

The Way of Peace, as the morality of democracies, 
he clearly defined, so that even the worst prejudice 
could not becloud the issue with irrelevant or con- 
tradictory assertions. 

"A steadfast concert for peace can never be main- 
tained except by a partnership of democratic na- 
tions. No autocratic Government could be trusted to 
keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must 
be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. In- 
trigue would eat its vitals away ; the plotters of inner 



TEE MISSION OF AMEBIC A 183 

circles who could plan what they would and render 
account to no one would be a corruption seated at 
its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their pur- 
pose and their honor steady to a common end and 
prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow inter- 
est of their own." 

Washington was charged with the heroic task of 
making the thirteen colonies safe for ^'Life, Liberty, 
and the Pursuit of Happiness;" Lincoln's patriotic 
mission was to unchain this Ideal for all America: 
and Wilson's sublime conception was to make the 
world ''safe for democracy," that its peace might be 
planted on ''the trusted foundations of liberty." 

A mind-union upon human meaning as an ideal is 
necessary for the patriotism of America. The 
right to life means that the making of right life has 
a right way. Those who deny the meaning of Amer- 
ica divest themselves of all claims in reason upon the 
rights of life defined in American history. The 
American kingdom of right is perfecting itself as 
rapidly as minds can be mobilized for its sublime 
task. The war-message extending the definition of 
American freedom says : 

"We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for 
ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices 
we shall freely make. We are but one of the cham- 
pions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied 



184 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

when those rights have been made as secure as the 
faith and the freedom of the nations can make them. ' ' 

And, finally, the duty of every American, worthy of 
America, enters the third epoch of American history, 
as did the patriot duty of Washington and Lincoln 
in their time. The message concludes in these meas- 
ured terms : 

*'It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful 
people into war — ^into the most terrible and disas- 
trous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in 
the balance. 

''But the right is more precious than peace, and we 
shall fight for the things which we have always car- 
ried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right 
of those who submit to authority to have a voice in 
their own Governments, for the rights and liberties 
of small nations, for a universal dominion of right 
by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace 
and safety to all nations and make the world itself 
at last free. 

' ' To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our 
fortunes, everything that we are and everything that 
we have, with the pride of those who know that the 
day has come when America is privileged to spend 
her blood and her might for the principles that gave 
her birth and happiness and the peace which she has 
treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. ' ' 



THE MISSION OF AMEBIC A 185 

The world in its social evolution has come on 
through its immemorial struggle to the crisis in its 
history, ^yhere civilization, as liberty in moral law, 
can progress further only as the forces of humanity 
are organized ^'to make the world safe for democ- 
racy. ' ' The final truth is that the world will be made 
safe for democracy when democracy is made safe for 
the individual. All political creeds, religious inter- 
ests and moral ideals, must have this democracy in 
which to work, before they can become free to develop 
their o^\^l truth. 

Autocratic egotism, w^hether framed in national or 
personal will, among many or few, must perish from 
the earth, with all its spoils and masteries, before 
there can be any possible '' government of the people, 
for the people and by the people." As "a house 
divided against itself cannot stand," so, a civilization 
cannot stand whose humanity is divided into the three 
special interests known to us as individuals, the na- 
tion and an alien world. 

The human task of conscience and reason, made 
clear in the progress of experience, finds the human- 
ity of child, mother and man in all its relations and 
interests, or it has not found God or the meaning of 
the Universe. 

Human peace and salvation are gained, not only 
through persuasion, education and regeneration, but 
also that the composing conditions of ''peace on 



186 THE STORY OF LINCOLN 

earth" shall be made materially safe for ''life, liberty 
and the pursuit of happiness." 

Physically, as well as spiritually, the faith that is 
'Svithout works is dead." The righteousness that 
allows its right to be defeated is not righteous, and 
the conscience that permits the crimes of inhumanity 
is no less unlawful before man and God. In such 
conditions, the prophet cried out, "Cursed be he that 
doeth the work of the Lord negligently, and cursed 
be he that keepeth back his sword from blood. ' ' 

The American democracy of Washington and Lin- 
coln, with their hosts of devoted associates, means 
individual righteousness and responsibility making 
safe the free-born mind for a moral world. What is 
an American and why so is the patriotic and religious 
interest developed through ages of sacrifice and suf- 
fering. Only those who are willing "to give the last 
full measure of devotion" to that divine work are 
heirs to the humanity of Washington and Lincoln, 
and who are thus entitled to be named Americans, 
or are worthy to share the heritage of America. 











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